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The IDEAS 
of a PLAIN 
COUNTRY 
'WOMAN 

TheCountry Contributor 





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The Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 



The Ideas of a Plain 
Country Woman 



By \ 

**The Country Contributor" 



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New York 
Doubleday, Page & Company 
1908 



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Copyright, 1906, 1907, by 
The Curtis Publishing Company 

Copyright, 1908, by 

DouBLEDAY, Page & Company 

Published, March, 1908 



All Rights Reserved, Including that of Translation 
INTO Foreign Languages, Including the Scandinavian 



[LiBRAfiY of C0N3.V-33J 
•j two Copies Keceivdu 

j MAR 20 1908 
COPY a- 



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INTRODUCING "A PLAIN 
COUNTRY WOMAN" 

Five years ago an article appeared in the 
Indianapolis NewSy under the signature 
of" A Country Contributor." Although the 
article was made part of a paper of many 
pages, it immediately "found itself" with 
the readers — principally the women read- 
ers. The writer was asked to continue, 
and for all these years there has appeared 
in the Indianapolis paper the weekly views 
of ''The Country Contributor." 

It was this work to which my attention 
was called, and I invited the author to 
contribute to the Ladies Home Journal. 
This was three years ago, and I have no 
hesitation in saying that her contributions 
have been more widely read and are to-day 
more popular than the writings of any single 
contributor to the magazine. 

It is difficult to analyse the peculiar 



Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

charm that the writings of "The Plain 
Country Woman" have for a wide public 
unless it is that the author has lived deeply 
and touches upon the vital well-springs of 
living with a hand that we feel is that of 
experience. As the author herself says of 
her writings: "I know all its shortcom- 
ings; I know it is disjointed; I know it 
lacks continuity — but it's me." But it 
is also true that people by the millions have 
read and are to-day, each week and each 
month, reading the writings of "The Plain 
Country Woman," irrelevant as it may be 
in her eyes and in their eyes, and they have 
read with pleasure and with profit. 

And it is with the hope that her views 
dealing with those phases of life that she 
believes to be ''woman's best estate" may 
find new and approving readers, that this, 
the author's first book, is presented to the 

public. 

Edward Bok. 
Philadelphia, 1908. 



Contents 

CHAPTER PAGE 

Introduction v 

I. The Copy Book 3 

11. The Woman Who Wears the Halo . . 10 

III. By Way of Retrospect 28 

IV. A February Monologue 45 

V. Rough Thoughts for Rough Weather . 59 

VI. Philosophies of a House-cleaning Day . 72 

VII. The Simple Life 85 

VIII. The Marriage Question 98 

IX. Some Needs of Woman 112 

X. The Truth about Love .124 

XI. Old Maids and Single Women . . . 142 

XII. A Chapter for Men to Read ... 155 

XIII. The Higher Education 169 

XIV. A Big Day 183 

XV. The Good and Evil of Books as They 

Pertain to Women's Lives . . . 197 

XVI. The Sin of Trying to Be Too Good . 210 

XVII. Reflections of a Grandmother .... 2,23 



The Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 



THE IDEAS OF A PLAIN 
COUNTRY WOMAN 

I 

THE COPY BOOK 

WHEN I was a child the copy book was 
my horror. The period for writing 
was one of the most mortifying of the 
entire day. To be sure it was not so bad 
as the first half hour after devotional exer- 
cises, when I was obliged to stand up at 
*'the board" and demonstrate to the entire 
school that I was a "dummy" in mathe- 
matics. I can still feel the hot flush on my 
cheekbones — all of our family had abnor- 
mally high cheekbones and were inclined 
to have them emphasised by red spots which 
contrasted unpleasantly with our blue eyes 
and "sandy" hair. As I say, I can still 
feel the burning of the hot, red spots as I 
stood trying to "cipher," to cheat, to get 

3 



4 Ideas of a Plain Country ^A(^oman 

the "answer" by fair means or foul, before 
the teacher turned his basiHsk eye on me 
and discovered that I was in a miserable 
muddle as usual. The copy book could 
be concealed at least from part of my school- 
mates but, no matter how I tried, by flatten- 
ing my hand over the page and sitting awk- 
wardly out of "position" until goaded back 
by the teacher, I never could get through 
the "writing" period without suff'ering agony 
from the supercilious glances of the girls, 
who sat near, and who made beautiful, 
clear pages, slanting and shading their letters 
exactlyright, or without the mean, red-headed 
boy, who was the bane of my life, craning his. 
neck across the aisle and exclaiming in a 
stage whisper: "Lordy,what hen-scratchin'!" 
It always seemed to me when I turned a 
new page that I was going to do better. 
We are a hopeful race — and each new day 
brings us the stimulus of opportunity — so 
with all the ugly letters behind me I used 
to begin on a new page with a sort of pre- 
sentiment that some miracle had been per- 
formed overnight and that now I could surely 
write like Laura or Clara or Kate, 



The Copy Book 5 

I think I know now why I could n't. I 
was not naturally imitative. This is the 
reason why I cannot do fancy work or flower 
painting or hang my curtains nicely or fix 
httle pictures in passe-partout, or write a 
club paper on Italy, or, in fact, do anything 
"like other people." 

I have lived to be glad of this. There is 
no use in everybody being so hopelessly alike, 
and much evil arises from unquestioningly 
following the copy set by people who are 
supposed to be "smart." If women would 
give up copying every new wrinkle of fashion 
and custom, if they would refuse to accept 
popular models and hold to instinctive pro- 
prieties this world would be a better place. 

Heretofore nobody has dared to ques- 
tion the supremacy of the perfectly groomed 
and well-mannered lady. She has so 
long stood as the model of her sex that 
it is an act of temerity to seek to dethrone 
her. Nevertheless I seek to do so. I say she 
is tiresome, that her "taste" is questionable, 
that her influence on society in unwhole- 
some. Young women of limited means try 
to copy her and thus place living on an 



6 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

impractical scale. They set a bar against 
marriage and make the family impossible, 
because each woman wishes to be idle, beau- 
tiful to look upon, accomplished in some 
way, and to have soft hands and rosy fin- 
ger nails and fluffy hair. The man woman, 
the woman athlete, the bachelor maid, the 
**bohemian" literary woman with ''ad- 
vanced" views are all offshoots of this 
morbid ladyhood, unwholesome reactions 
from too much niceness. 

When we think of the turning over of a 
new leaf we always think of it as being a 
man's reform. We have grown so accus- 
tomed to think of women as good and men 
as bad that there never seems any need 
for women to turn over a new leaf. But 
I appeal to my sex to try it. Throw away 
the copy book, and start out on original 
lines. This world has run to seed on doing 
the proper thing. The sameness of it is 
terrible and I do not wonder men break 
away and commit immorahties to interrupt 
the fearful monotony of elegance and cor- 
rectness in which nice women are contented 
to live. I can't help laughing over the atti- 



The Copy Book 7 

tude of the really fashionable woman. 
Usually she has a husband who is "drawed 
like a badger" and who makes a background 
for her spectacular plays. She never sees 
herself in her true light. It never occurs 
to her that it is cheap to be a lady of elegant 
leisure. She never feels what it means to 
be "kept" in sordid idleness. She does 
not realise that her only activity is one 
which the world could well dispense with. 

I want women to turn over a new leaf 
and instead of writing their plea for "rec- 
ognition" and the record of their wrongs, 
begin inscribing in simpler characters the 
real joy of living. For years we have heard 
of woman only as a complaining slave. Can 
we not come out of the abused attitude and 
live fully and freely ^ Can we not make 
away with a lot of our affectations and tram- 
ple upon the shackles we ourselves have 
forged by simply running to seed on pro- 
prieties and social ethics ? The creed of 
the modern woman is: "Say the right thing; 
do the right thing; look the right thing"; 
I persist she has run this creed into the 
ground and made her life read like certain 



8 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

cut and dried books of modern printing, in 
which the correctness of the people stands 
out with startHng newness and envelopes 
the reader in an atmosphere of fresh paint 
and plaster. This extreme correctness is 
achieved by a striving which bespeaks the 
parvenu. I hope my women friends will 
begin a reform with resolutions to be less 
like somebody else and more like them- 
selves, to do as they wish to do, not as some 
other woman sets the pace. There are too 
many ladies in the world now. We need 
women who like plain days of life, and who 
do not feel that they are in the eyes of the 
public. Why must we all be playing to 
the grandstand .? Can we not learn that 
the tribunal of dull pupils from whose deri- 
sion I used to shrink \vas the grandstand ? 
When you are copying accurately you are 
one of many, but you will be remembered 
longer if your page is not so perfect. 

Poor people like me who have lived in 
a ragged little byway of life are wont to 
feel that the fiat goes forth from people who 
are in touch with the tides of commerce 
and national affairs and the great social 



The Copy Book 9 

world. I doubt that this fiat amounts to 
much, and I am very sure that it has weight 
with the individual only as he allows it to. 

I wish I might reach the hearts of women 
and arouse them to a full appreciation of 
the fact that they need n't copy the super- 
fluities of life that our sex makes so much 
of. I wish I could shake them wide awake 
to the importance of little daily affairs that 
have to do with the bodily life — the clear 
fire, the good dinner, the simple house- 
keeping and home-keeping that is woman's 
best estate. 

So, come with me through the experiences 
and reflections of some busy plain days 
of life as I have tried to put them down in 
this book, and see if they are not better than 
fashionable functions, company manners, 
and days of idleness and entertainment. 



II 



THE WOMAN WHO WEARS THE HALO 

BEING a plain country woman, born 
and reared in a little inland town, I 
lived a good many years of my life before 
it occurred to me to speak out in meeting 
and say a few words that might reflect the 
daily reveries of thousands of women situ- 
ated as I am, and reassure them a little 
as to the purpose of their being, which 
seems at times to be called into question 
by leaders of the woman movement. There 
are plenty of hard-headed, sensible women 
who know that the woman movement is a 
delusion, and who have the hardihood to 
smile indulgently when the woman lecturer 
comes telling us what is the matter with 
us, and to get up the next morning and 
take up the business of life in perfect peace 
of mind, undisturbed by the suggestion that 



The Woman W^ho ^Vears the Halo 1 1 

women ought to be looking after higher 
things. 

There is nothing the matter with the most 
of us aside from the natural afflictions that 
flesh is heir to, and most of the aspirations 
that women are struggling with are fool no- 
tions promulgated by somebody who has n't 
anything better to do. 

I heartily dislike the idea of there being a 
"woman question," but suppose if there 
is one it hinges upon woman suffrage. I 
get dreadfully tired of the reiteration of 
the suffragists and the persistent division 
between men and women that they them- 
selves make by constantly seeking to bring 
women into prominence. I hate references 
to what women are doing. It would be so 
much better simply to say "what people 
are doing." The very stress upon the mat- 
ter of sex implies that it is a miraculous thing 
for a woman to do anything. Women prove 
themselves to be in the infancy of their 
mental development by calling attention to the 
capers they cut, and particularly so because 
in no branch of art or industry has woman, 
as a class, proved herself the equal of man. 



12 Ideas of a Plain Country ^A^oman 

Though our h'st of notable women is a 
long one, the fact remains that the great 
geniuses of the world have been men. This 
should not be especially discouraging to 
women. The world does n't need many 
geniuses. If you ever lived in the house 
with one you would be convinced that a 
little of him goes a long way, and after he 
was gone, and the family happily back into 
the old rut of being nobody in particular 
and having a good time, you would count 
your many blessings in a very tranquil state 
of mind. 

Woman attained her highest glory centuries 
ago, and the brightest halo that is worn by any 
face in our galaxy of saints and immortals 
is won not by any distinction of genius or 
of valour — though the woman who wears 
it has both — but rather by the simple car- 
rying out of a manifest destiny, a brave 
and cheerful acceptance of the existing order 
of things. 

I am not much of a reformer, being doubt- 
ful of the real good of many things that we 
call progress, but I am not going to set 
myself in the path and get run over by them. 



The ^A^oman "Who W^ears the Halo 13 

One can keep out of their way and besides, 
although there is a lot of fuss over the chang- 
ing conditions of woman's lot and the new 
regime, when the shouting and the tumult 
die it will be seen that there is a respectable 
minority living close to the ground, holding 
to the old ideals, and, above all, minding 
their own business — which is genius of the 
highest order. 

I am not much of a suffragist, either, if the 
truth must be told, possibly because I have 
always had so many more rights than I knew 
what to do with. There are already so 
many more things than one can attend to 
that it seems to me if I had the franchise and 
should suddenly find some added duties of 
citizenship thrust upon me it would be the 
last straw. 

There has never been any let or hindrance 
to my life. I am free to fire the furnace, 
shovel the snow out of the paths, hoe in the 
garden, dig potatoes, whitewash the back 
fence, trim the grapevines, curry the horse, or 
engage in any other manly occupation I 
choose. If a burglar gets in the house I can 
get up and shoot him if I want to. If I take 



14 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

a notion to go anywhere I can get on the train, 
take my own money, pay the hotel bill, and 
stay as long as I please. 

My husband believes in woman suffrage. 
He is willing, even anxious, for me to vote. 
He runs a Democratic newspaper in a strongly 
Republican county, and he often needs my 
vote and wishes he had it. I have no doubt 
if we had woman suffrage he would see that I 
got to the polls. He always sends our horse 
and buggy out to the poor-farm for the few 
paupers who remain staunch in the face of 
Republican prosperity, and, as they have to 
pass our house, no doubt they would stop for 
me on the return trip. The only condition 
would be: if I had time to £0. And then I 
feel sure I should worry all night under 
the impression that I had made a mistake 
in some way and not stamped the rooster! 
I am not very methodical. Personally, I 
should n't mind this uncertainty, but my hus- 
band knows the poll of our precinct to a 
vote, and if there were one out of pocket I 
am sure he would lay it on me and accuse 
me of doing it on purpose. I have n't any 
political convictions whatever, and it would 



The V/oman Who Wears the Halo 15 

be a lot of trouble to have to acquire them 
at my time of life. 

I am a great hand for living a day at a 
time, and I presume this is the reason I 
have n't many convictions. A day is n't 
long enough for them to form in, and by the 
next day there is always something else to do. 

I do not know whether this is the best way 
to live, but it has its advantages. In looking 
back it seems as if there were a lot of days — 
and that is a good thing! A long string of 
days, each with its complete story, is like a 
rosary of fragrant sandalwood. 

I remember days better than years, and 
some of the days seem the longer — no 
doubt they are. Our little chronology may 
not count for much in the great reckoning, 
but supposing there should be a day or an 
hour in our brief span that was worthy of 
being noted in the calendar of Eternity ? 
How then .? The day belongs especially to 
the women. Men think in years and dec- 
ades, but woman's life is in the details of the 
big scheme of things, and she sometimes 
rebels that it is so, and wishes that she, too, 
might take a hand at epoch-making. 



1 6 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

I have said to you that I have n't many 
settled convictions, and this is true; but I 
do have leanings toward certain doctrines, 
and among them is the idea of reincarnation 
— that is, of our coming back again and again 
to try it all over until we learn. Surely the 
women who have never had to work are 
not worth saving until they have been tried 
in the fire of daily toil. 

Some years ago there came a rumour, 
trailing over the country, as the folk-songs 
travel on the gossamer threads, that there 
was something new for woman. It un- 
settled us all a little. I was young and 
easily unsettled, and I felt a strong desire 
to go in for higher things, but fortunately 
never got the chance. I did go to cooking 
school, though, and learned how to serve 
things in bits of millinery and how to work 
over scraps of things we so seldom had at 
home that there was never a scrap left. I 
came home one November afternoon and 
began telling mother about some new re- 
cipes I had learned. She listened and finally 
asked: "Did she give you a recipe for 
pulling turnips ? That is what I have been 



The W^oman Who W^ears the Halo 17 

doing all afternoon." I thought it a little 
sarcastic of mother to say this, but have 
since looked at it in a different Hght. The 
turnips had to be pulled you know, because 
it was going to freeze that night. 

My mother was not a new woman, but I 
am quite sure she had the proper theory of 
life. You never went into her kitchen but 
you found there a copy of some entertaining 
or instructive book. You never helped her 
wash the dishes without learning something 
widely removed from dishes. Hers was 
the secret of a most successful way of living, 
and it is a way that any thinking woman 
can adopt. She could not go out into the 
world, but she could bring the world to her. 

Wherever you are, wherever there is a point 
of alert, interested consciousness, there is 
the centre of the universe. To be interested 
is to be happy, and to be happy is simply to 
be in accord with your word. A sense of 
this truth may come to you anywhere — 
over the washtub, out in the garden where 
the early corn is rustling, in the poultry- 
yard when you hear the sleepy chirp of a 
little chick under its mother's wing. If you 



1 8 Ideas of a Plain Country "Woman 

have suddenly felt yourself thus in touch 
with the Universal, know that it is a revel- 
ation, but do not be in a hurry to tell about it. 

The way to do things is to do them, and 
the way to be somebody is just to be it. 

There is never any glory in trying to do 
something which you cannot do, but there 
is always great honour and credit in doing 
anything well. Being a plain home woman 
is one of the greatest successes in life, if 
to plainness you add kindness, tolerance, 
and interest, real interest in simple things. 

There is a text of Scripture that applies 
particularly to women, and I think of it 
when I see one of our village women with a 
delicate ivory-tinted face and snow-white 
hair — "Though ye have lien among the 
pots, yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove" 
— and I smile when I see how intrinsic is 
that spirit of womanliness that rises white 
and unsmirched from life's scullery and its 
seeming degradations, and I wonder why 
it is that we are called upon to see and know 
all the unspeakable side of life, to bear the 
burden of it — do the menial tasks, hustle out 
of sight the debris, the ghastly accumula- 



The Woman Who Wears the Halo 19 

tions of daily living, and make the face of 
life sweet and attractive for man, for coarse, 
sinful, unsympathetic man, who is big and 
strong, yet who cannot bear the sight of 
such things! Then, after wondering a bit 
I come back to the old doctrine that service 
is the crowning glory of life, and that through 
it alone do we lay hold upon the eternal; 
and then I cease to wonder how mother 
gets her halo - — I know, and I know, too, 
that it is none too bright and glorious for 
the service by which she earns it. Every 
woman is a mother at heart, but it takes a 
mother in fact to know things just as they are. 

When I am feeling quite well, and my 
joints and muscles sing with the joy of liv- 
ing, I am glad to the heart that God put me 
in the industrial school of life and allowed 
me to take in its lessons at my finger tips. 
But when I am sick, and the physical machin- 
ery runs heavily, I fret a good deal, and feel 
envious of those women who have never 
had to learn the real lesson of life. 

I think no great lady with her knowledge 
of the world, her fine philosophies, and her 
education, can tell a bright, sensible woman 



20 Ideas of a Plain Country ^Voman 

who has home children and has done her 
own housew^ork anything really worth hear- 
ing about woman's life. I believe no preacher 
with his hands soft from idleness can in- 
struct her, and I feel sure that no layman 
with a reasonable share of mother-wit would 
attempt it. When it comes to arriving at 
the point she has the right-of-way, and if 
she rules the house and makes the entire 
family walk a chalk-line it is no more than 
she ought to do! The intelligent woman 
who has done real work — and by real work 
I mean labour with her own hands year after 
year in her own house and kitchen — and 
who has meanwhile reared a creditable 
family and still kept for her soul a pair of 
wings like a dove, is the perfect flower of civi- 
lisation, far superior to the woman of the 
world who knows the lingo of polite society 
and little else. 

The people who count in this world are 
those who, if everybody were suddenly 
stripped of every worldly possession, cast 
upon a desert shore, and confronted with 
only the raw material for living, would know 
how to take hold of it. 



The Woman ^A^ho W^ears the Halo 21 

I was telling a woman who was visiting 
me of my preparations for a dinner, and 
how I went out early in the morning of the 
day before and killed the turkey. She held 
up her hands in horror. 

"My dear, you did n't kill it yourself.^" 

"Yes, I killed it, and it was a twenty- 
pound gobbler and came pretty near to killing 
me!" 

"But how could you kill it.^" she said. 
"I couldn't kill a chicken if my life de- 
pended on it." 

I looked at her speculatively, and I de- 
clare I believe it was true. I don't believe 
she could kill one. I think she would just 
daintily curl up and die first. 

"Why, Mrs. Blank," I said, "if my chil- 
dren were hungry, and there was n't anyone 
else to do it, I could go out myself and kill 
a cow! 

I don't like to kill things; in fact, I hate 
to, but I can if I must. And this makes 
me think of a little episode in my life. I 
have been accused of having psychic powers, 
but really I am not so gifted, though I have 
had some peculiar experiences in having 



22 Ideas of a Plain Country W^oman 

dreams come true and seeing things that are 
not strictly in the landscape. 

One Saturday morning, several years ago, 
I got up with the feeling of being at the end 
of the rope. I don't know how often I have 
been at the end of it — a good many times, 
I suppose — but nobody would ever help 
me let go. This morning, however, I felt 
I simply must let go. I was sick and tired 
and discouraged. I felt that it was too bad 
for me to be ploughing around the kitchen 
at work when the sun was shining, and lots 
of people were out riding in parks, and sail- 
ing for Europe, and doing all of the beautiful 
things I was quite as well fitted to enjoy, 
but would never do. 

After I got the dishes washed, and the 
bread made up, and a cake baked, and the 
porches scrubbed, I remembered about two 
chickens I had put under a tub the night 
before to be dressed for Sunday. There 
was just about time to wring their necks 
and dress them and get them safely on the 
ice before I started in to get dinner. But 
I was seized with a violent attack of the 
dreadful "I don't want to's." I went into 



The ^A^oman Who W^ears the Halo 23 

the library and lay down on the lounge, just 
flattened out. I said to myself that I did n't 
care if the chickens smothered under that 
tub — the sun was getting dreadfully hot 
by this time — nor if the children did n't 
have any fried chicken for Sunday dinner. 
I did n't care for anything — I was at the 
end of the rope! 

My mother used to have a way of taking 
down the Bible, opening at random and read- 
ing the seventh verse. She said it invariably 
gave you a clew to the solution of your diffi- 
culties. There was a big, old-fashioned 
dog-eared Testament on the table just within 
reach of my hand. I took it listlessly, opened 
it, ran my eye down to verse seventh of the 
eleventh chapter of the Acts, which I hap- 
pened upon, and read the words : "And 
I heard a voice saying unto me. Arise, Peter ; 
slay and eat." (At home I have the repu- 
tation of telling yarns, and they pretend not 
to believe me when I recount anything mar- 
vellous. But I don't tell yarns. Truth is 
stranger than fiction, and this actually hap- 
pened just as I have told it.) 

When I read the verse I broke out laugh- 



24 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

ing. And when you are downhearted a 
laugh is the only thing that will cure you. 
I felt better instantly, got up, and went out 
and slew the fowls, and got through the day 
in good shape. 

It is not easy to laugh when one is tired, 
and really I am afraid my sisters are a little 
lacking in a sense of humour. I wish when 
Adam gave up that rib he had also parted 
with some of the funny-bone, so that his help- 
meet might be able to see the joke oftener. 
It would be a good deal of use to her when 
the clothes-line breaks or when the cow 
kicks the bucket over. 

We can't help holding a little grudge 
against life for making us do the little, me- 
nial, hateful things that women must do, and 
my knowledge of the fact that those who 
can do them and still be sweet and fine are 
the chosen Ones does n't help me in certain 
moods. I think rebelliously that I would 
rather not be a chosen one, but be allowed 
to slip along easily, neither learning nor 
developing. 

I know quite well how it is with many 
people who have the things I think I long 



The ^A^oman ^A^ho W^ears the Halo 25 

for. I know that the people who run away 
from winter and summer, impiously ''mak- 
ing their own climate," are running away 
from life. They are loosening the blessed 
moorings of home and gaining only the curse 
of the roving foot. I know that people who 
can buy fruit out of season are purchasing 
satiety and spoiling their taste for the simple 
and sweet products of the earth as they come 
to us according to Nature's plan. I know 
that the rich have no treasures. Nothing 
excites them with a sense of novelty. The 
Httle purchase, the little journey, the little 
glimpse of society that seems a wonder to 
me means nothing to them. They have 
tried everything ; and people must be inter- 
ested, so they fall back upon immoralities, 
pitifully seeking for new sensations. Now, 
I do not mean that all rich women do this, 
for many rich women have sense enough to 
live above wealth, just as the rest of us live 
above poverty; but this state of affairs ex- 
ists in very "high" society, and the reason 
for it is apparent. 

A woman may know all this and still in 
moments of despondency half wish that she, 



26 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

too, might live the idle, irresponsible life of 
flowers and light and music and perfume. 

In thinking of men and women it is diffi- 
cult to select from the male sex a type of the 
ideal man, but the heart leaps instantly in 
homage to the feet of the woman who wears 
the halo, and is to wear it, please God, till the 
end of time. I think it will always be an 
old-fashioned face, a little worn with time 
and toil, a little touched with sorrow, a little 
lacking in that hard, manly knowledge one 
sees in the faces of woman-suffrage speakers. 
Woman's lot will change with changing 
times, but the conditions for wearing the 
halo will remain the same. Women may 
attain a certain freedom of action, but there 
will be no more freedom of mind. Mind 
is always free. We have been told that the 
book, the picture, the piece of music must, 
if it is to be called true art, be of a great sim- 
plicity, that the wayfaring man can under- 
stand. So this face that wears the halo 
must be written in Hnes that every human 
being can read. It must not show too many 
of the refinements of life, or much pride of 
culture or learning. It must be a rugged 



The W^oman "Who \A^ears the Halo 27 

face, warmly touched with tenderness, lightly 
brushed with ladyhood to endear it to the 
truly refined, but with no affectations nor 
superfluous elegancies to frighten the timid 
or repel the humble. 



HI 



BY WAY OF RETROSPECT 

IN one of my philosophic moods the other 
day I fell to wondering what in the world 
the poet (Gray, was it not ?) meant by 
speaking of the short and simple annals of 
the poor. If there is anything in the world 
that is eventful it is being poor. Poverty 
figures in novels and romances almost as 
largely as love, and I do believe the dearest 
stories in all the world are about poor people. 
Where would be the charm in "Little Women" 
if the March family had been rich, or who 
would have cared half so much for Jane 
Eyre if she had not wandered out penniless 
and alone and had not nearly died of "star- 
vation and sorrow" .? I am desperately fond 
of an impecunious heroine. I want her to 
look prettier in her skimpy gray gown and 
white gull's feather than the black-eyed 

heiress in her velvet and sables. But truth 

28 



By V^ay of Retrospect 29 

compels me to state that I have a sneaking 
fancy for the hero with a fair backing of 
filthy lucre, or at least a rich uncle in the 
background, who dies in the nick of time. 
I am sentimental to a degree, but I want a 
financial basis of some sort. It is very un- 
comfortable for me to see a hero and heroine 
launched on the ocean of life with only love 
for their guiding star. No doubt my own 
experience has shown me how good a thing 
a little of the dross of riches might be, even 
for those who think they care only for love. 

However, Mr. Gray to the contrary, I 
insist that the annals of the poor are any- 
thing but short and simple, and are, on 
the other hand, fraught with excitement, 
exigencies, makeshifts, romances, and little 
tragedies of which the rich, the stupid rich, 
know nothing. I am glad that my memory 
goes back to old-fashioned village scenes, 
to times when we lived close to life and prim- 
itive things, and Nature was very near to us, 
and we never went very far from the begin- 
ning of things. As we grow older the charm 
of simplicity grows upon us. We wish to 
put away the complications of our lives and 



30 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

to get back once more to a sense of nearness 
to mother earth — dear mother earth, who 
told us all we know and in whose rugged 
bosom we shall sleep at last. 

In the old days we lived a religious life. 
The church was much to us. Sunday was 
the jewel of the week; our workaday world 
was toned and modulated by spiritual emo- 
tions and teachings. My father died when 
I was a tiny girl and it was my mother's idea 
to bring us up in the nurture and admonition 
of the Lord. To this end every function of 
the household arrangement was turned, and 
the mere suggestion that we were not in 
special charge of divine authority would 
have been received as rank heresy. I was 
an arrant little pagan from the start, given 
to cat-napping through thirdlies and fourth- 
lies, and to bringing my elders up short with 
unanswerable questions deemed perfectly 
scandalous by my aunts, but forgiven in 
secret by my mother, who in moments of 
loving communion admitted that there were 
many things one could not explain, but must 
just take on faith. We took so much on faith 
in those days that I surely should not re- 



By V/ay of Retrospect 31 

pudiate it now, and I would not, only that 
it does seem we a' so owe a good deal to the 
staying qualities of the old Franklin stove, 
the three-ply carpet, and the silver spoons 
that were great-grandmother's. 

We had great pretensions to gentility. 
We had good blood in us, but I have seen 
the time, sitting in the sanctuary, looking 
ruefully at my copper-toed shoes and in- 
wardly loathing my "waterproof" cloak, 
that I really cared as little for good blood 
as I did for faith, heartily wishing myself 
rid of both, like the little girl who sat behind 
me, resplendent in pretty and fashionable 
garments, kid shoes, and a hat with a feather 
in it! In vain my mother told me the little 
girl was "common"; that she lived in a 
rented house, and her mother used bad 
grammar. I wished to live in a rented house. 
I was tired of our house, with its queer little 
windows, its bleak white front door and the 
garden hugging it quite up to the back 
porch. Some people had iron fences; ours 
was a high, white "picket" affair, with 
rather unsteady gate-posts, and I resented 
the fact that the weight on the chain which 



32 Ideas of a Plain Country ^A(^oman 

pulled the gate shut was a jug — just a 
stone jug — when some people had stylish 
weights to their chains, made on purpose. 
The fact was there were many things we 
had which were not "made on purpose," 
but which would "do." 

Meanwhile our "annals" continued to 
be exciting. There was always some crisis 
at hand. The daily business of eating and 
drinking, over which my mother and aunt 
had personal supervision, was interspersed 
with problems of consuming interest. There 
was invariably a quilt in the frames or a car- 
pet in the loom, or there was a garden making, 
or apple-butter stirring, or hog killing. -In 
lieu of these stirring events there was the 
never-ending problem of wherewithal shall 
ye be clothed. Miracles of evolving some- 
thing out of nothing were being constantly 
worked, and the result was an aggressive 
gentility, which, being a little pagan, as afore- 
said, I cordially hated. In the midst of 
all this strenuous, happy life we found time 
for mild social occasions. Inviting the min- 
ister's family for tea was a yearly ceremony, 
and there were also neighbours and visiting 



By Way of Retrospect 33 

dignitaries to be entertained at stated inter- 
vals. The discipline of children in those 
days was a thing to make the devils believe 
and tremble. I could be relied on to mis- 
behave and get a whipping after the com- 
pany was gone, so I really dreaded the social 
aspect of our lives as much as the genteel 
phases. 

The presence of chicken and jelly in the 
cut-glass dish usually sobered me to some 
extent, but the dreadful threats as to what 
would be done to us if we should laugh or 
speak at the table so worked upon our sensi- 
bilities that we invariably gave way from 
sheer nervousness and laughed out, leaving 
the company to speculate whether it was 
the preacher's whiskers, which had a funny 
way of wagging up and down when he ate, 
or our uncle's peculiar method of "making 
an eye" at us to enforce discipline that had 
started us going. 

There was a little, shiny, brown teapot 
that was a great comfort to me at such times. 
It reflected my face in all sorts of queer dis- 
tortions, and, oddly enough, this had a 
tranquillising influence upon me, the only 



34 Ideas of a Plain Country ^Vonlan 

difficulty being that when I tried the effect 
of twisting my face up to see how it would 
look, I was invariably accused at the bar 
of justice, to which I was brought later, 
of having made faces at my aunt, who sat 
behind the teapot — a perfect pillar of gen- 
tility, with her best fringed cape and white 
apron, and her hair puffed at each side of 
her head into what we children irreverently 
called "horns." 

In spite of the drawbacks incident to 
the original sin of childhoods, I liked these 
social occasions. There was a sense of 
opulence in having a fire in the parlour and 
spare bedroom, and one could afford to 
swagger a little out on the sidewalk when 
he met other children whose mothers were 
cutting carpet-rags when ours was giving a 
tea party. Every dog has his day. 

I do not remember just where it was that 
the church slipped out of my life, and prayer- 
meeting was no longer an event of the week, 
but I fear it was about the time that certain 
young gentlemen began dropping in, in time 
for the last hymn or hanging about the doors 
with a crooked arm and a half-whispered 



By Way of Retrospect 55 

"May I see you home ?" Be that as it may, 
there were many years in which as a family 
we filed down the ais'e to the third pew 
from the front every Wednesday evening 
for prayer-meeting. And here again the 
question of disciphne was a vexing one. 
My sister and I between us had almost 
enough sense of humour to have made a 
man of us. You may believe this when I 
tell you that we invariably found fun in a 
Wednesday evening prayer-meeting. There 
was an old lady who pulled at her husband's 
coat-tail when he talked too long. Our 
uncle had a habit of going to sleep, making 
it necessary to poke him when called upon 
to lead in prayer, and once our aunt went 
to this same Wednesday evening service 
with her bonnet on hind side in front. In 
later years I have seen bonnets and hats 
that really looked quite as rational one way 
as another, but this was a sincere, open- 
face bonnet and the wayfaring man could 
tell at a glance when it was not properly ad- 
justed. We made the discovery after we 
were seated and the hymn had been given 
out. It was "Coronation" and pitched 



}6 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

rather high so the Httle shrieks of laughter 
my sister and I gave were drowned in the 
shouts of "And Crown Him !" that went 
up as my aunt, having discovered the mis- 
take, calmly took off the misplaced head- 
gear and turned it around. This time we 
were not punished for laughing in meeting. 
There is a limit even to discipline and our 
mother was mindful of us and remembered 
that we were dust. 

When I think how my own children were 
allowed to take part in the conversation, 
laugh at nothing, run and tear over the 
house, and speak at all times, whether spoken 
to or not, and see how much better they are 
than I ever was, I think that :n my day 
children were little martyrs I remember 
that my sister remained under a dark cloud 
of family displeasure for an entire summer 
because she told her grandmother that she 
ran like a cow. I suffered for her because 
of the snubs she got after her unlucky speech, 
and did all I could to alleviate her disgraced 
position. I even went so far as to confide 
in her that no matter how unpopular her 
comparison of her grandparent's means of 



By W^ay of Retrospect 37 

locomotion to those of a cow might be among 
grown folk, I thought she did run Hke one, 
and so did our little sister and our cousins, 
and that, moreover, grandma was an "old 
thing." I am a little ashamed of this now, 
in view of the fact that my grandmother was 
an uncommonly bright woman, but if she 
had only known enough to laugh at what my 
sister said, instead of going on her dignity 
over it, the effect upon the child would have 
been infinitely better. 

I believe that the popular idea of happi- 
ness is to be able to live in luxury. I have 
never tried it, but I feel somehow that it 
would be irksome. There must be more 
zest in living the closer one gets to the rudi- 
ments of life. We hear women complain 
of dullness and see them searching through 
the days and years for something of real 
interest to fill their hearts and atone for the 
things of which civilisation has robbed them. 
The gentle village women whom I knew in 
my childhood had no such anxieties. There 
was no time for ennui, and I believe there 
was fineness and quality in- their lives that 
is woefully lacking in the lives of women to- 



38 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

day. Nothing is more undignified and un- 
derbred than restlessness and discontent 
— and I think with regret of the placidity 
of the Hves of those women of a past gen- 
eration. How smoothly the work went on 
and how sweet were those homely industries, 
followed without a thought of regret or any 
sense of injustice in having to follow them. 
I realise the fact that, though youth is 
far enough behind me, I am still too young 
to indulge so much in retrospect. Retro- 
spect is for the chimney corner, with knit- 
ting and patchwork, and one ought really 
to save it up with this in view and go on 
making history until the last moment so 
that the stores of reminiscence may be full 
to repletion. Perhaps, then, when the evil 
days do come, the household will not tire so 
dreadfully of our repertory. If one did not 
repeat the same story oftener than, say 
once in six months or such a matter, one might 
hope to hold an audience among the juvenile 
members of the family for some years. How- 
ever, the retrospective habit grows upon me, 
and with it a tendency to philosophy and 
reflection really dangerous to a woman who 



By ^Vay of Retrospect 39 

still wears gay colours and tries to wear her 
hair in pompadour. 

I remember many queer implements per- 
fectly familiar to my childhood, which would 
not be recognised by half the grown people 
to-day. Carding machines and candle moulds, 
quilting-frames and steelyards, snuffers and 
sand boxes, reels and spindles and lead- 
ladles and bullet moulds! 

One family in our neighbourhood enjoyed 
the distinction of owning a "grab-hook." 
The uses of the well were more varied than 
they are to-day. Nearly all wells were open 
with windlasses of some sort for drawing 
water and low curbs, which were a standing 
invitation to children and little boys like 
Johnny Green of Mother Goose fame, who 
were seized with a desire to play a serious 
practical joke on the family cat. The well 
was commonly used as a refrigerator, milk, 
butter, eggs, custards, and all sorts of things 
being suspended into the cool depths on hot 
summer days. The frequency of accidents 
called the grab-hook into requisition so 
often that it was regarded as common prop- 
erty, and barefoot youngsters were apt to 



40 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

dodge in at the kitchen door with such re- 
quests as, "Say, Mrs. , will you let 

ma have the grab-hook ? Our bucket 's 
gone to the bottom." Or, "Can I get the 
grab-hook .? Ma's butter 's fell in the well." 

I often wonder how in a day's time all 
the work was done, but I recollect that it 
was a wonderfully cheerful way of living. 
There was much sunshine in it. I can see 
it now filtering through the grape arbour and 
making little checkers through the hop vines 
on the back porch, where somebody was 
ironing and the churn dasher was thumping, 
another was sewing, one child cleaning and 
decorating the bird-cage,while the others were 
playing or helping, with bits of work destined 
to be part of their education in later years. 

Yes, there is much sunshine in these short 
and simple annals of the poor! Our poverty, 
however, was not of the worst sort. We 
were poor only in worldly goods and gear. 
Our spiritual and intellectual endowment 
was very fair. There is no poverty like 
narrowness of mind and soul, but we had 
treasures that moth and rust could not cor- 
rupt. Poetry, history, books of travel and 



By Way of Retrospect 4 1 

romance made bright the hours of winter 
evenings. Discussions of questions in phil- 
osophy, theology, and national politics has- 
tened the hours of toil. We were not un- 
happy people. 

It is a doctrine of mine that the quality 
of mind does not change with what we call 
civilisation, except for the worse. In luxury 
the mind deteriorates, while simple and 
primitive living lightens it. It is good for- 
tune to be born in a quiet country place 
close to fields and water and real work, and 
the woods and animals, the trees and clouds 
and weather — and all sorts of teachers. 
Money and society and colleges and even 
travel have little to teach in comparison with 
life. Be careful, then, how you classify the 
lives of the poor as paltry, or say of a friend 
who has known the storm and stress of pov- 
erty: "It is a pity." Never pity anybody 
who can say of his youth: "There was 
much of sunshine in it." Beware also of 
choosing the member of the family who has 
"got to be worth something" as the success- 
ful man. Success in life is a personal matter 
— it is the individual life that counts. Our 



42 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

modern civilisation is the worst enemy to 
the individual Hfe. There is too much herd- 
ing together. Eating has become largely a 
spiritless and mechanical affair. Food which 
is prepared by other than loving hands loses 
the essence of soul nourishment that was an 
element of mother's cooking in the old vil- 
lage days when we were so happy and so poor. 
Deliver me from people who take their 
pleasure in material things. Life has so 
many better things to offer that the greatest 
pity of all seems to me to be for people who 
care most for hats and gowns, chairs and rugs 
and all the soulless things made by man. 
Nothing is quite so common as style. Noth- 
ing so tiresome as mere etiquette, nothing 
so nauseating as the round of stupid gather- 
ings we call society, and nothing so execrable 
as what women like to call "culture." Men 
never use this atrocious word. They could 
not do it and look each other in the face. 
The very intimation that a woman is "cul- 
tured" is enough to cause me to take to the 
woods in terror lest I should hear her do 
"stunts" of modulation with her voice and 
see her fix her massaged and "preserved" 



By Way of Retrospect 43 

face into smirks of cultured toleration for 
me and my crudeness. I make no special 
crusade against "cultured" women (there 
are no cultured men — when they become 
hopelessly cultured they are all the same sex), 
but I do resent their claim upon being "the 
real thing." Just now in our shifting and 
unstable civilisation there is little enough of 
the real thing. Our society is chaotic, because 
classes are not definitely assigned. Nothing 
is more fatally sure than for a people who 
are seeking a real democracy to become di- 
vided into two great classes, the rich and 
the poor. If birth does not count (though 
we all know in our souls that it is the only 
thing that does count) money is certain to 
become the criterion. Meanwhile, people 
who care for "a few friends and many books" 
must content themselves with such unwritten 
laws of natural selection as their environment 
permits, and for the rest cultivate selfishness 
with might and main. 

If we are going to admit it, which we are 
not, life comes pretty near to being a tragedy 
at best. Only home and quiet days of sweet 
renunciation and tremulous hope, only the 



44 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

family and the fireside, the love of man and 
woman held together by children of that 
love can save it from being so. Only great 
Nature, with her wonderful variety, her phi- 
losophy and promise, her insistent religion, 
her reiteration of God before law, can for- 
tify us for the trials of life and its final appar- 
ent defeat. All of these are the special 
blessings of the poor, and he only is really 
poor who fails to use them. I am so devoted 
to my village, with its sweet simplicity, its 
quiet intelligence, its near friendships, and 
its general "hominess," that nothing could 
draw me away from it save the promise of 
a still simpler life in a really "new" country, 
where brains and muscle and physical 
strength and courage are the things that 
count. But I should be lost there now. 
One goes to a new country while he still has 
youth, and I forget very often that mine is 
gone. I am a girl until I look in the glass 
or hear some young person place me with 
the middle-aged people, or take thought 
how long ago things happened, and remember 
that my lengthy and brilliant annals of the 
poor transpired far back in a past century. 



IV 

A FEBRUARY MONOLOGUE 

OUR family has a way of making up 
expressions which nobody else ever 
heard of. One of them was "We are having 
a wallowing time." This meant that things 
were badly congested and that we were hav- 
ing a more perplexing time than usual to 
keep the "old ark a moverin" which was 
saying a great deal. Necessity is the mother 
of invention, and it seemed very often that 
the peculiar exigencies and trials we were 
singularly disposed to demanded a new 
vocabulary. Life was never very smooth 
sailing for any of us and it was a common' 
thing for one branch of the family to ask 
with deep concern: 'Well, how are you 
getting along ?" 

There were no telephones in those days 
to carry bad tidings, or good ones either, 
so we just had to wait until Saturday, when 

45 



46 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

somebody came to town, or maybe Sunday, 
after church was over, to unbosom ourselves 
of any new turn of untoward fate which 
we assiduously refrained from mentioning 
to the neighbours, but told to the "kin" 
when we got a chance. Of course, if it was 
very bad, like your smoke-house getting 
afire and burning up your yearly supply of 
meat, or the lightning striking your cow, 
or somebody being "bad sick," we sent a 
messenger, but this sort of adversity had its 
charm. There was an element of excitement 
in it, and we children got a good deal of satis- 
faction watching from the front gate to see 
the old rockaway, drawn by Ned and Pete, 
two shaggy farm horses, round the village 
corner, and to speculate as to which aunt 
or aunts had come to condole and sustain. 
I liked Aunt Lizzie best because she always 
laughed and said: "Cheer up now, I have 
never seen the righteous man forsaken or 
his seed begging for bread!" And then we 
would all sit down to a dinner of spring 
lamb and green peas, dainty asparagus tips, 
crisp, fresh lettuce, rhubarb pie, peach pre- 
serves and thick clotted cream (unless this 



A February Monologue 47 

was the time the Hghtning struck the cow, 
and even then there might have been some 
still left in the water-trough at the milk 
house) and other things that seemed to just 
**grow" in those days. 

I remember hearing this same merry-faced 
aunt say to my mother once along toward 
the end of a hard winter when the yarn 
stockings looked as if they just would not 
last through, and we had run out of carpet 
rags, and the back of the kitchen stove had 
caved in, and the "stone coal" was dwind- 
ling away, and uncle's term of office about 
to expire, and the spring taxes staring us 
in the face: "Well, how are you getting 
along?" Mother replied: "Oh, we are 
just wallowing in the trough of the sea. 
I am afraid we can't navigate!" If they 
had n't both laughed immediately I think 
I should have died of heart failure, and thus 
lightened the heavily-freighted domestic ves- 
sel of my little weight, at least. I always 
watched intently for the glimmer of a smile 
during these family conferences, and, hap- 
pily, seldom failed of finding it, for we were 
philosophers in our day and generation, and 



48 Ideas of a Plain Country V^oman 

humourists as well, and we had that rare 
faculty of seeing the joke which is such a 
precious treasure to us through this vale of 
tears. 

After this conversation between the two 
ladies, we often spoke of having a "wallow- 
ing" time when things were very much out 
of fix with the domestic machinery. 

For years my sister and I have had the 
habit of hastily knocking on wood before ad- 
mitting that we were getting along pretty 
well, but one late February afternoon she 
came down for a long afternoon visit and we 
fell to canvassing the family affairs, and after 
dragging all of our skeletons to light and 
putting them back again in good order we 
came to the comforting conclusion that 
things might be worse. I said to her in the 
words of "Granny" when she paraphrases 
Omar: 

Come, now, cheer up and have a cup of tea, 
Things ain't so bad but what they might be worse. 

We forgot all about knocking on wood 
and I put my shawl over my head and went 
a piece of the way home with her and felt 



A February Monologue 49 

the rare sensation of the suggestion of spring 
in the twihght when the sunset burns clear 
and primrose colour behind the woods and 
there is a breath, intangible and sweet, that 
brings us a promise — ah, what promise, 
dear heart! Anyway, I came home and 
sat down by the glowing fire and was happy, 
and never once thought of "knocking on 
wood." That very evening things began 
happening, and they have kept it up with 
cheerful alacrity ever since. Not great 
things, maybe, but little, nagging annoy- 
ances — and it is the little foxes that spoil 
the vines. 

Affliction can't hold a candle to daily care 
and worry and friction, to the dull grind of 
making bricks without straw — the mo- 
notonous task of trying to like what you 
have. When affliction comes, your friends 
rally round you — at least those who amount 
to anything — but when it is merely dull, 
monotonous, straining sorrow or care, they 
are dreadfully hard with you and say you 
brought it on yourself, or that you have a 
mania for looking on the dark side. 

I have never yet known it to fail that when 



50 Ideas of a Plain Country "Woman 

I was just at the last straw limit, the man 
of the house fell ill. I am told it is a way 
they have, and I am quite sure I never knew 
the family to get into deep waters, but that 
the maid either took sick or left. Of all the 
afflictions that can befall a household, hav- 
ing the man of the house ailing is the worst. 
A sick man is God's ignoblest work. When 
a man is sick you might just as well abuse 
him first as last, because he is determined 
it shall be so. Take up cold coffee and cold 
toast and a cold egg for his breakfast. 
Never try to keep them hot — it irritates 
him. He wishes them to be cold and have 
no taste to them, so he can give up after a 
few ineft'ectual attempts to eat, and lie back 
on his pillow with a sigh and a reproachful 
glance and ask you to send for his sister, 
and perhaps she can cook something he 
can eat. 

I had this experience once long ago. 
My husband had the mumps. I gently 
told him that nothing tastes very good when 
one has the mumps. He wished to drink 
buttermilk, but I felt that the acid in it 
would hurt his swollen jaw dreadfully, and 



A February Monologue 51 

tried to dissuade him. It is a test of woman's 
love to see her hero with his jaws swollen 
out of all reason and bound up in red flannel. 

Finally I sent for his sister, and he laid 
in his complaints to her and told her he 
wanted some buttermilk, and he wished to 
drink it out of the pitcher as he used to when 
he was a boy and slipped into the old milk- 
house on a hot summer afternoon; poor 
fellow, he had fever, I suppose, and was 
wishing with boyish impatience and lack of 
reason to be rid of it. His sister is a won- 
derfully good woman, and broad and chari- 
table in her views, but no man's mother or 
sister ever lived who wasn't just a little pre- 
judiced against his wife. This is perfectly 
natural. I am sure I should be so. If I 
had a grown-up son or brother, I know I 
never could quite love the woman he chose 
in preference to me. And this reminds me 
of one of a little bunch of stories I was writ- 
ing the other day under the title, "The Pains 
That Wars and Women Have." Here is the 
story: 

"A man twenty-five years old sat with his 
head in a woman's lap. His shoulders were 



52 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

shaken with dry sobbing, and the woman 
gently stroked his hair. 'Mother, mother,' 
he muttered, 'it isn't so much giving her 
up — I could bear that — but having to 
stand and see her given to another man, a 
man whom I detest, that is what I cannot 
endure!' 'Will it be worse, my son, than 
seeing the man you love given to a woman 
whom you detest ?' asked the mother. ' Be- 
cause that is what would have happened to 
me if you had won her.'" 

But this is neither here nor there. My 
husband's sister is fine, and if, as she took 
that big pitcher of buttermilk to the bed for 
her mumpy brother, to drink deep, like 
Lord Marmion, of the flood, she had just a 
faint air of reproof toward me, I hereby 
excuse her for it. The first gulp took effect 
on the irritated salivary glands, and with a 
roar the invalid fell back, taking the pitcher 
with him and deluging himself and the red 
flannel bandages and the bed, to say nothing 
of wasting the good buttermilk I had meant 
to make biscuits and gingerbread and maybe 
light bread, too, out of. You can make 
lovely light bread with buttermilk. 



A February Monologue 53 

This disaster was far worse than the one 
which happened to Sweet Kitty, of Coleraine, 
for in that case the ''sweet buttermilk" 
only "watered the plain," and this gave the 
mumpy patient a full bath and his sister 
had the pleasure of straightening him up 
and getting his bed in order. My husband 
says I am the most unsympathetic nurse 
alive, and maybe I am. At any rate when 
I saw that pitcher go over, heard the roar 
of pain, witnessed the change from master- 
ful solicitude to plain everyday exasperation 
that passed over the benign visage of my 
favourite sister-in-law, I made a home -run 
for the kitchen, where I bent double on the 
edge of the wood-box and added ten years to 
my life by laughing till the tears rolled down. 

No, I am not much of a nurse. There is 
too much of the savage in me — the primal 
instinct for life that deserts the afflicted. 
Does n't that sound dreadful — but then, 
you know, I never really do it. I struggle 
fiercely against sickness and I wish every- 
body to do the same, and I do get outdone 
with a man when he goes to bed with a silly 
pain that a woman at a big reception with 



54 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

her new gown on, or one over the wash-tub 
in a tenement house, would bear with never 
a thought of flinching. 

I have had sick people say to me quite 
often, *'You seem so alive when you come 
into the room, you seem to bring life with 
you, in your voice, your step, your touch!" 
Perhaps the reason for this is because I do 
so love life and so desire that the patient 
shall feel well again. I bring him the sug- 
gestion of health and good spirits, but I 
am a poor nurse, except in extremes of life 
and death; then I do fairly well. 

Among the many cares that have beset 
me in the last month (February is my hard- 
luck month always) has been a sick neigh- 
bour. It is dreadfully trying to have to 
sit and write for the press when your 
neighbour is sick and you want to go over 
and clean up her kitchen and give the chil- 
dren a bath. These children are pretty, 
and everybody is anxious to do for them, for 
nothing is more forlorn than little children 
whose mother, who has been their nurse 
and also maid of all work for the household, 
lies helplessly ill. My neighbours arc com- 



A February Monologue 55 

parative strangers in the town, and there are 
no relatives to come in and administer 
buttermilk and other little intimate atten- 
tions. The only bright side to the affair 
is the fact that after the first day or two of 
fretting around mother's bed, the young- 
sters do not know they are forlorn, but take 
happily to the disorder of the house and 
the new hired girl who can't cook and whose 
special talent seems to be to carry out all 
over the house the unmistakable evidences 
of its mistress being hors de combat. 

A week or more ago an aunt appeared 
upon the scene and it was decided she 
should take the little girl home with her. 
The little girl is what farmers call a "good 
feeler." She is nearly three and is about 
as fair an example of perpetual motion as 
one could find on a February day when 
somebody is ill and there is a special reason 
for keeping quiet. She is such a pretty 
little soul, I pitied her mother having to 
give her up, but I did n't say so, and helped 
all I could to get her started. I heard the 
hack which was to take her and her aunt 
to the early train depart and I wept a little 



56 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

for sympathy with the sick mother 
having to kiss this darHng baby good-bye 
— who knows for how long ? I did n't get 
over all day — for I am the slave of the 
pen as the genii of Aladdin were slaves of the 
ring — but in the evening I slipped off a minute 
thinking I might console the little brother who 
I knew would be lonely, by telling him his 
favourite story of "the three bears." He is a 
good child and though he is only five, full of 
the manliest sort of ideas about "taking care 
of mamma." 

I was greeted with the usual uproar of 
childish voices as I entered the invalid's 
room, and the first thing I saw on entering 
was the little girl jumping up and down in 
her mother's bed with a rat-terrier in her 
arms and her face as dirty as a pig. The 
next thing I noted was that the mother 
was better. Her face had relaxed from its 
tenseness and looked soft and girlish again. 
She smiled at me a little sheepishly, as I 
glanced from her to the obstreperous baby, 
who was acting like the old Nick and sing- 
ing and screeching to her brother, whom 
she was romping with. 



A February Monologue 57 

** Did n't you send her with her aunt?" 
I asked, trying to assume a severity I was 
far from feeling after seeing the happy light 
on the mother's face. 

"No" — she faltered — "I just couldn't 
— I didn't sleep at all last night, and at 
three o'clock I woke her father and asked 
him if I had to let her go. He said no, so 
I went to sleep — and here she is!" 

Just then the father came in and spoke 
quite sternly to the little girl and told her 
to get right off the bed; but I stopped him. 
"No," I said, "she's got this young one 
now, and I hope she will just jump up and 
down on her till she flattens her entirely 
out." The girl-mother laughed weakly, and 
when I left, both children and the pup were 
on the bed with her — but if you will believe 
it she is much better now and able to sit up. 

Things are looking up here at Grouch 
Place, too (I knock on wood as I write it). 
The man of the house is better and I have 
caught up with my work a little and last 
night I went out to throw out the dish-water 
after dinner (we have n't any sink, and this 
is a part of our trouble), and saw the new 



38 Ideas of a Plain Country "Woman 

moon squarely over my right shoulder and 
not through a tree either. As I write a few 
tentative snowflakes are falling. My jon- 
quils, tulips, hyacinths, and daffodils are 
far above the ground — but I am not going 
to let this discourage me, but stick to the 
promise of the new moon. 



V 

ROUGH THOUGHTS FOR ROUGH WEATHER 

I ASKED a farmer the other day which 
month in the year was hardest on man 
and beast and he replied: "March — 
March — March by long odds!" I noticed 
in his voice the grumbling note so common 
to our speech, so indicative of our inhar- 
monious attitude toward life. March is 
a rough month in the country, and in a sense 
a discouraging season, but why should we 
growl about it when we know it is inevitable 
and that it has its uses in the plan of the year ? 

I have lived much alone, and in the quiet 
days when the children were away at school 
I formed the habit of making friends with 
the weather. 

There are so many phases of what we 

stupidly consider the commonplace, which 

will become very dear to us if we allow them 

to but I believe women are especially mis- 

59 



6o Ideas of a Plain Country \Ai^oman 

taken in closing their hearts to the charm 
of the passing hour. 

They have set their hearts on other things, 
and if they cannot have them they are at 
least going to have the pleasure of sulking 
about it — working dully ahead with com- 
pressed lips and grave faces, and stoically 
accepting the egregious doctrine that their 
portion is but a poor one compared with the 
good gifts which others have. 

There is a big, joyous, hearty way of ac- 
cepting what life brings you, but women have 
not been taught as men have that it is a 
disgrace to shirk. They seem to think it the 
proper thing to do, or finding shirking out 
of the question they are prone to settle 
down, to relinquish impressions of romance, 
renounce artistic instincts, and narrow them- 
selves to what they call the practical. In 
this they hugely abuse the practical. A 
woman may be practical without losing the 
habits of mirth and laughter that made her 
girlhood so lovable. 

Indeed, if she is thoroughly practical she 
will see that it is her own personality she 
should cultivate for her own sake, rather 



Rough Thoughts for Rough Weather 6i 

than stupid economies and hard, morbid 
sacrifices by which she dehberately destroys 
much of her feminine grace and charm. 

Men have a much better appreciation of 
the simple blessings of life than women have. 
They set the proper value upon the func- 
tions of the senses, upon good health and 
food and plain conjugal joys. 

Women like to call this simple content 
with life — man's coarseness; but no, it is 
man's genius, his nearness to the workings 
of great Nature that makes him thus, and 
women would do well to cease their fretting 
after little worldly possessions and achieve- 
ments, and acquire the habit of allowing 
life to be as dear to them as it wishes to be, 
and as it will be when they understand. 

We are wont to say of the country woman 
who has never been out of her native state, 
and seldom seen a theatre or a street car, 
that she has seen little of life. I challenge 
this statement. I say that the woman who 
was born in a great city, educated in a wo- 
man's college, sent abroad in the conven- 
tional fashion and married suitably, at the 
proper time, has seen little of life. I say 



62 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

that many such women Hve and die without 
seeing hfe or knowing in any sense what 
life is. 

Society is not life. While its narrow 
round is sounding its brass and tinkling its 
cymbal, Hfe is going fiercely on, down in the 
narrow street where we struggle for bread, 
out in the barn-yard where the feathered 
folk are stirring to spring industries and the 
patient beasts are waiting our demands. 

Life is here in the kitchen, where the 
woman must, with consummate cleverness 
never be excelled by any art or accom- 
plishment, minister to the bodily wants of a 
few of her fellow-creatures. 

It is the woman who has walked across the 
fields on a wild winter night to help a sister 
woman in her hour of trial, the woman who 
has dressed the new-born baby and com- 
posed the limbs of the dead, learned the rude 
surgery of the farm, harnessed horses, milked 
cows, carried young lambs into the kitchen 
to save them from perishing in the rough 
March weather — it is she who has seen life. 

My lot was cast on the ragged edge of a 
little Indiana town with the plain fields 



Rough Thoughts for Rough W^eather 63 

and a fringe of flat woodland behind me, 
and the rural sights and sounds of the village 
not far away. We were very poor. The 
kitchen was my kingdom for many hours 
in the day, and there was not much outlook 
from its one window. I had not much 
learning. My education stopped short of a 
common-school course. I never had any- 
thing pretty to wear; our house was meagrely 
furnished. I was obHged to evolve for my 
children such garments as I could devise 
from the outworn raiments of their elders 
and such bargains as I could pick up at the 
village store. Many a time I have made a 
little petticoat from an old coat or an apron, 
from a discarded shirt, but in these cramping 
surroundings I was not at all unhappy, and 
I think the reason was because I loved beauty. 
Does this sound contradictory .? I think I 
hear somebody say: "What! a woman 
who loves beauty condemned to live in a 
common place like that!" 

Pardon me. Sometimes people who are 
great lovers of beauty are allowed to live in 
common places and find it, and this is so 
much better than having it brought and 



64 Ideas of a Plain Country 'Woman 

laid at one's feet that I hope no one will 
underestimate my great privilege. 

Somehow, amidst my heavy work and 
daily care and worry, I stumbled upon an 
impression of art. I have n't any idea that 
I got it right, but it has answered the purpose 
so well I hope nobody will tell me if I am 
wrong. I learned that art is simply a way 
of looking at things. And after that I never 
looked at a tree or a ragged meadow or a 
gleam of cold March sunshine without a 
happy stirring of the heart that meant art 
to me, 

I hope nobody will think that this is non- 
sense, for I am anxious that other women 
situated as I have been may yield to just 
such a mood, and let the March day as they 
see it from the kitchen window, whether it 
be a blustering day with snow flying, or a 
clear twilight with a hint of old-fashioned 
Easter flowers blooming and blessed robins 
hopping about, be to them a picture day; 
for life is short, dear woman, and at its end, 
in looking back, March days seem scarce 
enough! 

Out here in the country where I live 



Rough Thoughts for Rough Weather 65 

March is a time of prophecy. One has only 
to step out upon the ground to feel the sap 
rising and sense the relenting mood of the 
fierce season. 

There are still a few sugar camps close 
to my home, though methods of sugar-mak- 
ing have changed and lost many of their 
picturesque qualities, and trees of any kind 
are fairly disappearing from the face of 
the earth. I always grieve when I see a 
dripping spout in a sugar-maple tree. It 
seems so like draining the heart of nature, 
but she yields her sweet sustenance like a 
loving mother, and doubtless pardons our 
ingratitude. Sugar-making, like all crude 
home industries, appeals with special interest 
to the children. What other reason can 
there be for children's quick response to 
Nature and the primitive than that their 
perception of the divine is still unspoiled 
by that world-knowledge which never brings 
us the joy we felt in the life-knowledge we 
learned in the good old-fashioned days and 
ways ? 

Children so dearly love to see us taking 
hold of life in the big work which country 



66 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

people do. They like to go with us to fix 
shelter for the lambs to which the March 
wind is not tempered. They like to see us 
"set" the hens, and their delight knows no 
bounds when we "take off" a brood of little 
chickens or bring part of them into the 
house, to keep them in a basket near the 
fire if the cold day makes the eggs slow in 
hatching. They are wild with joy if a rare 
day comes in which we may "spade up" a 
bed for early garden. 

Have you ever thought how the tenderest 
language of Jesus always has reference to 
some simple thing that will fix the attention 
of a child '^. — to the hen and her chickens, 
the straying sheep, to hunger and thirst, to 
Martha with her housekeeping. 

To be sure these utterances only reflect 
the environment of Jesus, but is it not strange 
that in a Christian land which claims the life 
of Jesus as the foundation of its civilisation, 
the farmer should be held in ridicule, his wife 
pitied because she lives away from "life"! 

I have noticed that women who talk and 
write about plain, daily life almost invari- 
ably endeavour to idealise it too much. 



Rough Thoughts for Rough Weather 67 

This is the true feminine instinct. Women 
Uke to trim things up. They will put a 
petticoat on the lamp-shade and a sash on 
the door-knob if they get half a chance. 
Women can seldom dissociate the idea of 
beauty from fabric, and are always a little 
at a loss to separate the truly artistic from 
the merely dainty. It is this instinct that 
troubles the woman of refined sensibilities 
when she finds herself confronted by work 
which she thinks is degrading, or by a plain 
life which seems bereft of the "beautiful 
things" she imagines are satisfying to 
woman's nature. 

There is no proof that a longing for "beau- 
tiful things" is an indication in itself of a 
refined nature, or that being happy and 
satisfied in common surroundings bespeaks 
cheap taste. It is difficult to decide what 
is really cheap. I have seen the holy halo of 
motherhood shining about the face of a 
young woman rocking her new baby in a 
little, ugly, imitation cherry-wood chair, 
and I have seen real rosewood and mahogany 
furniture in homes where the atmosphere 
was worse than cheap. 



68 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

One lesson that women in all grades of 
society need most to learn is that of modera- 
tion. They need to practise the medium 
gait. The woman in the kitchen needs to 
learn that sleight-of-hand by which she may 
shove her work out of the way and make 
room for a variety of interests. There is a 
fine spiritual energy that we m.ay put into 
living, and that enables us to accomplish 
our tasks with the master hand. 

Women need to learn to ignore petty and 
narrow perfections, to get the effect without 
the detail, to save the force some women 
expend on morbid scrubbing and scouring 
and apply it in bringing entertainment arid 
enlightenment, and good, old-fashioned fun 
into the household. Most good women are 
too conscientious, and I have known "earn- 
est" women to drive people to drink. 

I despise bad housekeeping, and so many 
*' bright" women are bad housekeepers. 
They think they are great enough to live 
above unwashed dishes and untidy rooms. 
I hope never to attain this pinnacle of great- 
ness, but I do wish my sisters would abolish 
standards of painful excellence with their 



Rough Thoughts for Rough Weather 69 

consequent worry and nagging for an un- 
varying standard of cheerfulness and humour- 
ous treatment of daily mistakes and bits 
of "bad luck" that one might quite as well 
laugh as cry over. 

I have been looking about for some bit 
of old-fashioned March lore to tell you — 
but can find nothing but the cat story. 
We take account of cats and dogs in the 
country, because they, too, are the people 
we live with. 

I went some years ago to visit at a lonely 
house far in the wooded hills, and as I 
entered the room an enormous cat rose up 
from a big rocking-chair by the fire, and, 
stretching himself, yawned majestically. I 
thought it was a young tiger, but my hostess 
explained that it was only a March cat. 

She said that kittens seldom arrive at 
this vale of tears in the month of March, and 
that when they do they always grow to 
immense size. She further assured me that 
March is a fortuitous birth-month, and that 
men born in March are sure to be virile 
and ambitious. 

I was not convinced that this was true 



70 Ideas of a Plain Country ^Voman 

either of men or cats, but some years later 
I went one day to see a woman who was 
weaving a carpet for me. In the loom-room 
I found, reposing on a heap of carpet rag 
balls, a huge cat fairly rivaling that other 
one. I asked the woman if she "raised" 
the cat, and when she said she did I inquired 
what month he was born in. After think- 
ing and calling up contemporary incidents 
she informed me that he was born in March. 

I relate this as a warning to any over- 
burdened sister who may be nervously on 
the lookout for the 'Mast straw." 

She may be feeling herself fairly *" mired 
down" in March mud. There is no use 
trying to idealise the mud which the men 
and children "track in" this time of year. 

She may be fairly itching to clean house, 
and prevented from doing so by having to 
smoke meat and set hens and cook for a big 
family and a "hand." 

She may be feeling dismayed over the num- 
ber of mouths there are to feed, with so many 
live things around and more constantly 
arriving at this prolific time of year. Pos- 
sibly she may be bringing the "runt pig" 



Rough Thoughts for Rough Weather 71 

up by hand to get a little "money of her 
own." But if the faithful tabby, with seem- 
ing lack of good judgment, should add to 
the family at this inconvenient season, do 
not, with an exalted idea of grasping the 
world with a strong hand, drown the kittens 
before the children find them, for you will 
be destroying fine specimens of cathood 
and interfering with the doctrine of the 
survival of the fit. 



VI 

PHILOSOPHIES OF A HOUSECLEANING DAY 

I LIKE to "talk about cats and things" 
and think it no disgrace to exchange 
recipes and discuss housekeeping methods, 
but the "smart" woman of modern times 
has looked with contempt upon such com- 
mon conversation — thinking we" should dis- 
cuss more vital topics. This is surely from 
misapprehension of the word — she must 
have forgotten what "vital statistics" are. 
I wish I knew what it is that they want, 
these women who constantly express in such 
impassioned strain their discontent with life, 
but more, I wish that they themselves knew. 
Only the suffragists state it definitely. They 
want equal rights with man. I am not an 
anti-suffragist or anti anything else — I 
am merely setting down impressions as they 
come to me uninfluenced by much that 

affects the trend of thought of most women 
72 



Philosophies of a Housecleaning Day 7^ 

writers, but it is impossible for me to be- 
lieve that the franchise would do other than 
complicate the "woman question." The 
Civil War did not solve the " Negro problem." 

But then, I only know how the franchise 
would affect me. If an angel with a flam- 
ing sword should appear before me this 
minute and say, "You are free, you may 
vote, you are a citizen," it would not change 
one feature of my life. I should have to 
get up and get breakfast in the morning 
and go on with my housecleaning just the 
same. 

That I had an even chance with man in 
the business world would not bring me busi- 
ness ability. My arms would not be stronger 
to strike with the hammer nor my legs more 
sturdy to follow the plough. I should still 
be subject to every limitation of sex. 

The business woman who complains to 
me that women are not well paid for their 
work would not have her craft more at her 
finger-tips for equal rights. 

The majority of women do not know what 
it means to work as men work, steadily, 
moment by moment. They drudge, and 



74 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

allow a sense of bodily degradation in doing 
it to pull them down and break their spirit, 
but they do not in the least understand 
what physical and mental force must be ex- 
pended in the mastery of a trade or a pro- 
fession. Very few women are fit for this 
concentrated application. It is not a "fair 
chance" that women need to make them 
the equals of man in this sense; it is bone 
and sinew and reserve force in brain and 
nerve cells. 

Not that woman is a sickly creature, or 
even a weak one, but she is not "built" 
to be man's rival in the business or profes- 
sional world. 1 believe this with all my 
heart, and also I believe that she is peculiarly 
fitted for the varied activities of plain home life. 

As to the injustice of our laws as they 
pertain to the personal and property rights 
of women, here again I am at sea. When 
it comes to a woman's standing on her legal 
rights as opposed to her husband, or to 
squabbling over the children born of their 
union, the worst has already happened, 
and there is scarcely a dignified way of set- 
tling the trouble. 



Philosophies of a Housecleaning Day 75 

I like to believe that most people are sane 
and healthful in spirit, and I shrink from the 
details of domestic infelicity which loose di- 
vorce laws encourage, sensational newspapers 
promulgate, and careless moral sentiment 
is responsible for. Women talk too much of 
these things. If men talked more we might 
have a revelation as to what many of them 
have to endure from sordid wives who in- 
sist on being "kept" like lilies of the field, 
who refuse to rear families, and rebel against 
the responsibilities of housekeeping. 

While I sympathise deeply with the trials 
of my sex and know that many of us bear 
them nobly, I am convinced that women 
are often unreasonable in their demands 
upon men's time, patience, love, and pocket- 
book. I know it is an accepted idea that 
men have everything their own way; that 
they slight and neglect their wives, and that 
women are powerless to retaliate. But much 
of this is exaggerated by women's morbid 
brains. 

Women are fed on morbid mental diet 
almost from the cradle. Fiction, which 
women and girls read omnivorously, is 



76 Ideas of a Plain Country \A^oman 

largely morbid. Religion as dispensed by 
sentimentalists is morbid. We are fairly 
swamped in morbid health-fads, and women 
let their minds run on imaginary ills, ac- 
cepting the ridiculous idea that we are a 
race of invalids. The truth is. Nature takes 
good care of the mothers of her race, and, 
when not interfered with, she manages 
finely. I hope we may hear less complain- 
ing, less abominable testimony, less damag- 
ing admission of wrong living, and that 
women will get back to the normal and to 
eternal truth that can never be changed by 
any agitation of popular sentiment, will get 
over the idea that there will come a time 
when men will "understand"; it is woman 
who needs to understand. 

Woman achieves her nearest equality 
with man when she is simply and health- 
fully alive and at work in her natural sphere, 
when she is not striving for recognition or 
whining for appreciation. "The king is 
but a man as I am — the violet smells to 
him as it does to me!" So, man is but a 
creature who lives and loves and dies. He 
breathes with pleasure the fresh air of the 



Philosophies of a Housecleaning Day 77 

early spring, drinks clear water, smells the 
upturned sod, knows the delight of sleep 
and the taste of bread — am I not the same ? 
But I am more. God has atoned to me for 
all the weakness of my nature; He has given 
me fulfilment where man has ever but an 
exquisite longing. He has given me the 
child, the warm nearness of its little head 
upon my heart, the blessed weight of its 
body in my arms. It is this human near- 
ness, this mutual feeling for life, that makes 
man and woman one and obliterates all 
questions of equality, and in this simplicity 
of being we deeply sense the existence of 
purpose in all that we do and bear. 

We country people are especially blessed 
with this nearness. Life is simple and its 
duties are plain, yet many of us do not 
know that this is a blessing. We look away 
to the city and sigh for its luxury and ele- 
gance, not realising that we are the people 
who live close to the great secret which the 
world so often "stands tiptoe to explain." 

Did you ever try being happy just because 
it was raining or snowing or blowing, or 
because it was April or May or November ? 



78 Ideas of a Plain Country ^A^o^lan 

Any of these is sufficient reasons for being 
happy, but few people know it. Indeed, 
young people are discouraged by ambitious 
parents and teachers from yielding to moods 
of being happy over nothing, and counselled 
to strive and grasp and attain and accumu- 
late, forgetting everything but the work in 
hand. Men in hot, dusty offices and stores 
and counting-rooms must indeed do this, but 
women, more blessed in their work at home, 
may keep close around them a sense of what 
the beautiful world is doing, and share in 
the impressionistic rapture with which April 
clothes the faintly greening woods in mists, 
hastily splotches the grass with dandelions 
and streaks the colour on startled tulip petals 
scarcely awake and aware. 

I used to have a friend come from the 
city to visit me. She would sit in the kitchen 
while I worked and lament over my hard 
lot, and the fact that I was buried in this 
little backwoods town. "Youth and beauty 
are so precious, and talent so rare," she used 
to say. " It is an outrage for yours to be 
sacrificed working for a man and children." 
She would often get me worked up into such 



Philosophies of a Housecleaning Day 79 

a state of self-pity I wonder I did not commit 
some dreadful folly, for I was young and 
had not yet learned the deep meanings of 
life. But she was wrong in every premise. 
Youth and beauty are not precious, neither 
is talent rare. The years are merciless to 
us all, and I think, the "well-preserved" 
woman of forty with her massaged face and 
juvenile costume looks her years more pain- 
fully than the sweet country mother with 
life's dear story written on her strong, quiet 
face. 

My friend was a good woman and her 
sympathy was genuine, but she did not know 
what she wished for me and had nothing to 
offer me but the pernicious seed of discontent. 
Do not allow what people of this sort tell 
you of the glories of the "outside world" to 
distress you. There is no outside world. 
Life is life, and the world is your world. 

The woman who is cleaning house on an 
April day is so fatally prone to allow her 
happiness to depend upon other people and 
upon circumstances judged by other people's 
standards. This is a little way of looking 
at life. Suppose your house is old and plain 



8o Ideas of a Plain Country \A^onian 

and its furnishings shabby as compared 
with your neighbour's. Does not April love 
you just as well — is not her face quite as 
tremulously tender, do not her robins sing 
their world-old love song at twilight, and is 
it not for you ? 

Step out into the April night some time 
when you are perplexed by life's problems, 
and see the stars hanging down from the 
sky. Feel the fresh tides of the year throb- 
bing, half-hear the stirrings of sprouting 
things and the nestlings of young creatures 
to sleep and mother. Imbibe the trust in 
which they go to rest, and take the gift which 
life is constantly offering you. If you ask 
me what that gift is I reply that it is a soul 
quickened with a willingness to live and 
trained to the proud humility of obedience 
which takes rank with command. 

In trying to tell women of a serenity that 
may come into their lives if they will only 
admit it, I do not mean that they can arrive 
at a point where everything will move so 
smoothly that there will be no friction. 
Too many impractical writers have told 
women this. It is easy to put on paper a 



Philosophies of a Housecleaning Day 8i 

plan for smooth, perfect action in the home 
and kitchen. But we who have lived there 
year in and year out know better. We 
know that the dishes will not wash them- 
selves while we go out to drop corn or plant 
potatoes or sow early garden seeds. The 
little garment we left on the sewing-machine 
when we got up to cook dinner will be there 
when we return, and if the bread runs over 
the pan while we are out making a bed for 
sweet peas it will be too light and have big 
holes in it — or if we "work it down" it 
may taste sour when it rises again. I be- 
lieve the thing which most frets the woman 
in the kitchen is the idea that many of her 
sisters live without care and worry while she 
must degrade herself with toil. If this were 
true we should still be the fortunate ones; 
but it is a great mistake. Life does not 
move without effort for any really bright 
people; friction keeps us alive, and the 
woman whom you see idly sitting around 
is a dull person whom you should not envy. 
One great cause of the unrest among 
women is the idleness enforced upon many 
of them by riches. They take up foolish, 



82 Ideas of a Plain Country ^Voman 

baseless causes just to have something to do. 
I visited a rich woman not long ago and 
watched her lounging about in the morning 
while an overworked maid was hurrying 
through the rooms striving to get things 
straightened up. My fingers fairly itched 
to help her, and I saw so much the mistress 
of the house might have done with pleasure 
and profit to herself and her digestion, and 
with great benefit to her home and relief to 
the harassed maid. 

Perhaps what these women who write to 
me of longings and ambitions unsatisfied 
need to do is to cultivate appreciation. 
Whatever we really appreciate is ours. It 
is a possession nobody can take from us. 
We need to look at life in the abstract as 
a thing of wonder and beauty. 

We must learn to regard suffering and 
trial through the sublimity of what they 
bring with them: courage, patience, endur- 
ance. We must learn to see death through 
the beauty of renunciation, classic as the 
marbles and cypress trees that typify it. 

As for happiness, it, too, is symbolical. 
It belongs to us exactly in proportion to our 



Philosophies of a Housecleaning Day 83 

appreciation of it. People who know what 
happiness is are happy. Only those who 
do not understand remain fretting like foolish 
children. 

I am persuaded that much of woman's 
"unquietness" comes from wrong think- 
ing about marriage. I look with much dis- 
favour on our modern hesitation over the 
"advisability" of marriage. This foolish 
and immoral attitude is part of the "woman 
question" — and woman is responsible for 
it. Middle-aged women who think they 
are "sensible" constantly remind young 
women to look ahead and see what the man 
can give them of "the good things of life." 
This coarse expression embraces the cut-glass, 
sterling silver, finery of all sorts, uselessly 
shod feet, fine white hands and general 
elegance which young women are taught 
they must have. This attitude on the part 
of womankind, more than any other thing, 
is responsible for Old-World immoralities 
which are said to be growing in our great 
cities with shocking rapidity. 

I am glad that I live out in the big world 
of spring, where I can see the farmers break- 



84 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

ing ground and feel the deep religion of 
such vital work. Men go daily into avenues 
of money-making with a sense of dishonesty 
in their hearts, but the ploughman can never 
doubt he is doing "God's service" when he 
plants the seed for bread. 

I am glad to work in the exquisite light of 
the April morning — glad when a dainty 
little shower comes lilting across the mead- 
ows, driving us all in from our planting, 
and pelting the bowed heads of the tulips 
and jonquils — glad when the thunder rolls 
along the distant hills and the sun flashes 
out again and life and the day's work are 
before me. 



VII 

THE SIMPLE LIFE 

THE simple life is typified in my early 
recollections by a washing-day at 
grandmother's. There was a pungent odor 
of cleanliness about the place exhaling from 
the lye-soap in the big gourd, and the walk 
from the kitchen door to the milkhouse was 
scoured to a rich cream colour. The cinna- 
mon rose-bush was in bloom, and the dazzling 
whiteness of the clothes on the line as they 
flapped against the deep blue sky, together 
with the long stretch of green, green grass 
that felt so good to one's bare feet, made a 
combination of vivid colouring that hurt 
the eyes and made one wish to look away 
across the orchard, where there was a soft 
pink and white mist, to the woods, traced 
delicately in their early verdure. 

Grandmother resting on the bench under 
the big sycamore tree, her arms bare and 
85 



86 Ideas of a Plain Country ^Voman 

her hands pink and crinkled from long im- 
mersion in the suds, took me on her knee 
and told me about the laurel that must be 
blooming in the mountains far away where 
her old home was. She said that no flower 
that blooms out here in this strange country 
can ever be so pretty as the mountain laurel, 
not even the cinnamon rose which 1 admired 
so much, or the May pinks down in the 
garden, freshly uncovered from their winter 
sleep and mingling their perfume with the 
scent of upturned earth from the garden 
beds and cool, new paths, where it was an 
awesome delight to go pattering at twilight. 
The garden was a new world rediscovered, 
and all through the summer it would have 
its moods for us — its remoteness of sweet 
corn and pole-beans, its aristocratic retire- 
ments of sage and musk geranium and 
lavender, and far in one corner its melan- 
choly patch of hemp which grandmother 
raised, partly for seed for the canary, partly 
to remind her of the hempfields she used 
to know in Old Virginia. 

The big, gray farmhouse was sweet from 
top to bottom with the rejuvenation of spring. 



The Simple Life 87 

The girthing-striped rag carpet which grand- 
mother had woven was freshly laid over 
clean straw on the sitting-room floor. The 
sprigged muslin curtains at the parlour win- 
dows were beautifully laundered; the quilts 
had all been upon the line, washed or aired 
as was needed. They made a goodly array, 
filling up every available inch of line and 
running over upon the garden paling. Those 
on the paling were decidedly below the salt, 
plebeian nine-patch or four-patch. The 
aristocrats on the line had nothing to do 
with them. There was the Whig rose, the 
star pattern, the Irish chain, the ocean wave, 
the log-cabin and other patterns whose 
names I have forgotten, besides the "tufted" 
counterpanes and the spreads that great- 
grandmother had woven. 

Grandmother must have been very tired 
indeed that day, but she did not say so; she 
only told me about the laurel, and I remem- 
bered it. 

I think it was from the blood of Old 
Virginia that I inherited the crude feeling for 
life that has been such a treasure to me through 
years which some people might call hard. 



88 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

Among the people of my blood who lived 
amid the green hills and blue mountains of 
the Shenandoah Valley there flourished the 
true type of the simple life. Charles Wagner 
failed to elucidate the simple life to the mind 
of the wayfaring man. The Scripture, as 
usual, hits the mark when it insinuates that 
the wayfaring man is likely to be a fool. He 
is, and his manner of "faring" doesn't 
indicate anything. He may be tramping, 
or riding in his automobile or his private car. 

These valley people lived very heartily to 
the day and hour. They relished life. They 
were not trying to do anything but live. 
The old walls that had sheltered their an- 
cestors were devoid of ornament, the bare 
floors were polished by the feet of genera- 
tions, the staunch old furniture was mellow 
with the tones of age. Fires in huge chim- 
neys were dully smouldering or springing 
to welcome beckonings at nightfall. There 
was no effort toward elegance. The people 
were the home. If you have ever known 
the air of such a place, style and interior 
decoration will always seem cheap to you. It 
was what they lacked that made them fine. 



The Simple Life 89 

I hope the reader will not take this as 
an epigram. I detest epigrams, and they 
have been so fashionable of late years. 
Our popular fiction has bristled with the 
covert immorality of smart sayings. 

When I say that it is what we lack that 
makes us fine I mean that Life stands ever 
ready with her compensations for all of our 
losses. 

I love that stanza of Mrs. Browning's 

In the pleasant orchard-closes 

"God bless all our gains!" say we; 

But, "May God bless all our losses!" 
Better suits with our degree. 

From these simple-hearted people, who 
lived so close to "wind and sun and summer 
rain," I inherited God's best blessing for all 
our losses — a keen taste for living. 

It was on a fourteenth of May — I remem- 
ber the plum-tree was in bloom, and the moon- 
light flooded our little village dooryard — 
when the boy and I vowed to marry as 
soon as we were rich enough. Later we 
decided to do it anyway and not wait to 
be rich enough. It was a dreadful mistake, 
as we found out later when there were some 



90 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

children with nobody but us to look after 
them. Man remains a child long after 
woman has come to a realising sense of duty. 
My young husband — a Tom Sawyer village 
lad — had little taste for the ties of domes- 
ticity. 

There are two distinct kinds of men: 
domestic men and the other kind. The 
latter are pretty sure to be attractive to girls. 
They are likely to ride horses and carry 
guns and have dogs following them. 

I aKvays wondered what became of the girl 
who ran away with Young Lochinvar. I 
warrant the quiet fellow who stood awk- 
wardly by and let his bride be carried away 
would have made the better husband. "A 
laggard in love and a dastard in war" is 
sure to be a good hand to do up the chores 
and dry the dishes and stay at home evenings. 
He will go to church with his wife, and set 
the hens, and run the clothes through the 
wringer, and read aloud from the farm 
paper while she fashions garments for the 
little ones from the worn-out raiment of 
their elders. This is the domestic kind. 

At the risk of seeming unduly personal 



The Simple Life 9 1 

I may remark that my life-partner was the 
other kind. He was a sportsman, a man 
of the streets and town, a man's man in every 
sense of the word — and I was a mother, 
a child in years, but I had a world to make 
for my children, a castle to build — and 
how was I to build it unless I learned to 
make bricks without straw ? 

In foregoing chapters I have spoken to 
women of the duty and pleasure of work; 
let me now remind them of the pleasure and 
duty of idleness. If I had not known how 
to loaf and when to be a vagabond I should 
have fallen by the wayside, or have grown 
old and hard-featured and bitter, with no 
relish for life and no heart for song and story. 

I know that city people believe they have 
all the advantages, but I am sure that country- 
town people are the lords of the earth when 
it comes to good living. 

No matter how poor we are, we are always 
in reach of luxuries. A clear fire, a fresh 
egg, a pitcher of sweet milk or of pure water 
— these may seem very unimportant things 
to the woman who wishes to broaden her 
life by moving to a city, but you narrow your 



92 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

life immensely when you dispense with 
anything sweet and natural that goes to sus- 
tain it. 

My instincts were sharpened to the bodily 
needs of my children. I was like a tiger- 
mother when she says to Life: "Give me 
something for those little cubs!" And I got 
it, because Life always obeys when you speak 
to her like that. 

But there was so much more besides food 
to be found for them. There was beauty 
and the joy of living, and the charm of world 
lore, and the realm of the imaginary. Many 
mothers more fortunately situated than I 
was cannot find time to convey these things 
to their children. They have too many 
mterests. 

I did heartily covet the grille-work and 
draperies that adorned my friends' houses, 
but while they were busy cleaning them I 
found time to lie on the old faded lounge in 
our little library and read Shakespeare or 
Poe, or go roaming off with the children to 
hunt spring flowers. 

We were always too poor to keep a horse, 
but we kept one. You are up in the world 



The Simple Life 9^ 

when you own a horse, and if you have a 
dog you are sure of at least one faithful 
henchman for retinue. My children and I 
with our horse and dog made many trium- 
phal pilgrimages through the world of May. 
I think our rank in the court of spring was 
fairly high, at least we never found any lack 
of welcome there, and always came home 
garlanded and loaded with favours. 

My friends thought I was atoning for my 
mistakes by making more. They thought 
I was not diligent enough and was inculcating 
in my children habits of idleness. 

Many of my friends had no children and 
were fairly insolent in their triumph over it, 
but they know now that I lived in the sun- 
shine of life while they toiled dully in the 
shadow. 

I wish I could impress upon women some 
understanding of the value of many things 
they are taught to discard. The great 
trouble with women is that they are all trying 
to follow the same lifeless model. In their 
passion for refinement they lose the very 
essence of life; and in doing so they often 
fling man back upon immorality, in his 



94 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

natural seeking for the primitive. Man 
instinctively reaches out for the primal mate 
— and too often she is not there. 

I heartily pity women who have lived in 
the narrow groove of ladyhood. Some peo- 
ple may consider me coarse. It is true, 
my hands are not nice and I do laugh heartily, 
and perhaps I do not "appear" quite well 
in fashionable society; but I believe the 
word coarse is as often misused as any in 
the language. It seems to me that nothing 
coarsens a woman like luxury. 

Some months ago I was dining at a fash- 
ionable hotel in a city when a couple entered 
the room and sat down at an adjoining table. 
They were people who "lived" at the hotel. 
I saw at once that they belonged to the 
"fortunate" class — one could tell by the 
cut of their clothes, the diamond rings that 
fairly stiffened the woman's pudgy fingers, 
the man's air of deadly boredom, and the 
woman's hostile countenance. She bestowed 
a casual ferocity on my old-fashioned sleeves 
out of the supply of scorn she seemed to 
carry on hand. The puffy circles under 
her eyes and the unwholesome stoutness 



The Simple Life 95 

of her figure betokened the stupid ease of the 
woman who "does n't have to work." 

There was some terrapin on the bill-of- 
fare — I think it was not genuine — and the 
couple discussed its merits in the dead-alive 
fashion common to the rich man and his wife, 
who are astute with the fashionable neces- 
sity of expurgating from their conversation 
any hint of originality or possible interest. 

I did wish I could tell them about the time 
I killed the turtle, and how much better it 
was than what they were eating. 

My husband has a habit of bringing home 
his minnow bucket and leaving it on the back 
porch for me to explore after supper is over 
and he has flown to town with his cheerful 
freedom from domestic cares. Whatever I 
find there is mine to do as I like with, be it 
an eel, a bullfrog, or a mess of pretty black 
bass. Many a spring evening has found 
me in the back lot taking the scales off the 
fish while the children danced about in 
semi-savage glee and the cats contested 
claims for the heads. This time it was a 
great big turtle — and it was alive. I shut 
the children and cats up in the kitchen and 



96 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

gave my undivided attention to the turtle, 
for I had never dressed one before. 

The fat woman with the rings would 
have fainted dead away if she had seen me 
dispatch that turtle and split its shell open 
with the hatchet. But I knew how real 
terrapin tasted and she did not, and as I 
observed her I suddenly knew that there 
were such a lot of things that I knew which 
she did not, and I was glad of it! 

In reviewing a period of my life which is 
closed now, since the children are gone away, 
I am conscious of a distinct charm in the 
living of it, with all its hardships and heart- 
aches. 

I believe I can tell women what that charm 
was and that they may profit by it. It was 
variety. Whenever it w^as possible I sub- 
mitted to the mood. I kept up an armed 
neutrality with Duty and never allowed her 
to get the better of me. I never followed 
anybody's lead. I lived my own life. If 
I wished to ride a horse, or to play a game 
of cards, or to go wading in the creek with 
the children, I always did it. 

I never strained my eyesight or racked 



The Simple Life 9-7 

my nerves trying to arrive at small perfec- 
tions. I avoided rivalries and emulations. 
In short, I lived. 

The other evening the boy — he is forty- 
eight years old now and has scarcely a wrinkle 
on his face — hung up his hat and coat and 
sat down to spend the evening at home. It 
was chilly and I had started a little fire on 
the hearth. We looked at each other, and 
the tears sprang up in our eyes because the 
children are gone — and because 

I felt like quoting these lines to him — but 
I did n't: 

When all the world is old lad, 

And all the trees are brown; 
And all the sport is stale, lad, 

And all the wheels run down: 
Creep home, and take your place there, 

The spent and maimed among: 
God grant you find one face there 

You loved when all was young. 



VIII 

THE MARRIAGE QUESTION 

MY FAVOURITE month for weddings 
is April, though June or any other 
season will do if the couple who are marry- 
ing love each other, and the kinsfolk have 
"nothin' at all to say." There is a tender 
light in the April world, more typical of the 
delicate intimacy of souls, which is the true 
nearness of the married state, than the 
passion and joyousness of June. -Passion 
and joyousness are transient emotions, but 
tenderness and affection survive the shocks 
of trouble and misfortune, and the slow 
wearing of inevitable years. ' 

I was married in December, but June 
would have been fine for me, because I was 
a summer girl, and looked my best on a hot 
day. What I suffered in winter from a 
red nose, purple cheeks, rough skin, and 
stiff unmanageable hair, was made up to 



The Marriage Question 99 

me in hot weather by httle perspiration, 
curls around my face, a complexion that 
did not freckle or tan, and a general sensa- 
tion of revelling in warmth and sunshine. 
Yes, I should have made a fine June bride — 
but this is a contrary world. 

A wedding was a simpler and, I believe, 
a happier thing in those days: two or three 
new frocks and a modest housekeeping out- 
fit. One really pities the children of the 
rich who are so surfeited with presents and 
finery as to have utterly lost interest in them. 

Shall we ever learn, do you think, that 
few possessions are best, and that the poor 
are the only people who have treasures ? 
Shall we know some time that precarious 
shelter and some uncertainty as to food and 
raiment bring us close to God because we 
must trust Him like the birds which "with- 
out barn or storehouse are fed" ? 

I know the modern bride, with her absurd 
array of gifts, making the house look like 
an auctioneer's room or a fancy store in a 
city, might well envy my delight in the fam- 
ily Bible, the one set of silver spoons, the 
porcelain "teaset," the simple table linen, 

tore 



100 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

the twenty-five precious gold dollars "from 
the groom's father," and the gay bed com- 
forter padded with lamb's wool, washed and 
"carded" by her own hands, which Aunt 
Margaret quilted for me. You have to 
"quilt" a wool comforter, because the wool 
slips out of place if you merely "tack" it 
as you do one made with cotton. 

Gifts lose their value when they have no 
suggestion of utility, and the beginning of 
married life loses half its charm without 
the sense of embarkation on a risky ven- 
ture that comes to a young couple that 
know that there are immense difficulties to 
encounter in the immediate future. 

I am afraid there is a lack of real virility 
in the rising generation. The college athlete 
and the golf and basket-ball girl seem to 
contradict this opinion; but some way the 
spirit and verve of these young people ap- 
pear to be perfunctory and they never seem 
to get down to the real business of life with 
genuine earnestness. There is through it all 
a holding to the "swell thing" — to a sort 
of smartness that demands a money backing 
— a dependence upon a *'good start" which 



The Marriage Question loi 

we used, in the old days, to scorn waiting 
for. This is one of the great evils of society 
— the extravagant basis which young folks 
believe they must begin life on. The idea 
of caution naturally takes hold on the minds 
of the very class which should marry and 
populate the earth, and has little weight with 
the class that should not. The result is a 
falling off of population in the thinking, 
conscientious class — the people who wish 
to be sure they are right before going ahead. 

Business and social conditions are largely 
responsible for this state of affairs. Young 
men see that the chances for rising to real 
independence are very few. They realise 
that their lifetime must be spent under an 
employer; there is not the old-time inspi- 
ration of "starting out for yourself" which 
gave such delightful stimulus to the day's 
work when husband and wife were pulling 
hard together toward the longed-for goal 
of independence. Few people realise the 
intense artistic passion of the day's work, 
or know that it, not achievement, is the 
crowning glory of success. 

I doubt if there is a self-made man living 



102 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

to-day who would not gladly barter his 
millions and all his remaining days of stale 
success for just one year of the old times 
with his young wife and the blessed babies 
whose helplessness made life so much more 
perilous and sweet. 

I am no misanthrope bewailing the evils 
of the times. I know there is nothing to be 
gained by that, but it is a pity that the big 
business has swallowed up the little ones, as 
the flat and the family hotel are swallowing 
up the home. All you who have a home, no 
matter how modest — with just a bit of 
yard and garden to call your own, room to 
walk about and watch the children play, 
and to potter around at gardening and hor- 
ticulture or poultry-raising — try to bear in 
mind how you are blessed in this indivi- 
duality of living above those who are crowded 
between the high, heartless walls of the city. 

But there is no saying truer than that trite 
one, the home 's where the heart is; so home 
can be adjusted to changing conditions and 
its sweet essence preserved no matter if we 
are doomed to "work on a salary" and live 
in a side street. 



The Marriage Question 103 

I like the side streets, and in my infrequent 
visits to the city I find more happiness there 
than in the more fashionable dwellings. 

I hate to think or talk a great deal about 
the evils of society. I believe it does little 
real good; but a certain class of women seem 
to glory in the unpleasant details of popular 
immorality and to find in them a justification 
for their cynical attitude toward what they 
like to call "the marriage question." They 
will not hesitate to tell you that they are 
"opposed" to marriage, seeming not in the 
least to realise that such an attitude is very 
damaging and reflects upon themselves. 

When a wealthy city woman said to me 
recently that she was decidedly opposed to 
marriage I replied indignantly: "How dare 
you say so .? You might quite as well say 
you are opposed to life!" 

She smiled sardonically. "My dear," 
she said, "you know little about life," and 
then proceeded to detail vile things to me 
till my cheeks burned hot and I wished I 
could "cut" the reception she was having 
that afternoon and run home — home to my 
shabby old sitting-room and the quiet domes- 



104 Ideas of a Plain Country W^oman 

ticity of the neighbours — the sane bless- 
edness of my country town, where I might, 
amidst toil and sacrifice, cherish the beautiful 
ideals of life that help one over the rough 
places and keep one's heart young even to 
old age. 

I believe this acute sophistication — this 
world-knowledge women have been so anx- 
ious to acquire — -has cheapened them im- 
measurably. Hostility toward immortality 
is a poor weapon compared with that larger 
means of warfare which ignores much and 
persistently upholds the ideal to the rising 
generation. 

I asked my friend what she proposed to 
have her girls do, since she did not wish 
them to marry. She replied that their father 
could give them the luxuries their position 
demanded, and that there was music and 
art, and literature and society, and club and 
church work, and travel, more than to fill 
up their lives. I saw then, that the woman 
had lost the precious savour of life and was 
acutally content with the barren ideal that 
places material things before the mysterious, 
intangible mood for living that makes young 



The Marriage Question 105 

people, and some old people if they be very 
wise, so irrationally happy. Her husband 
was a millionaire, but I did not envy her 
or him. 

I am hoping that there are not a great 
many women who believe as she does. It 
is a pet idea of mine that the great majority 
of married couples love each other. Maybe 
it isn't "smart" to think this, but I do 
think it, sensational newspapers, putrid 
fiction and the divorce docket to the con- 
trary notwithstanding. 

Few people are gifted with real instincts 
of propriety regarding vital things. There 
should be in every human mind the instinct 
to preserve the ideal of love. Unfortunate 
personal experiences should never lead us 
to discredit love itself. 

People are vastly ignorant regarding the 
mating instinct and the holiness of it, and 
this is due to wrong teaching and the pro- 
mulgation of light sentiment in ribald stories, 
cheap songs, sensational plays and immoral 
epigrams. These are nauseating to the quiet 
thinker who understands some rudiments of 
God's purpose. 



io6 Ideas of a Plain Country V^oman 

Our children need a plainer guidance along 
the simple truths of life. Women are to 
blame for so much that is wrong in the 
world it seems a pity to charge them with 
anything more, but I do arraign them on 
the charge of being unduly sordid and "sen- 
sible." I charge them with over-educating 
their daughters, over-refining them and giv- 
ing them huge overdoses of culture. I am 
not very fond of culture. I like naturalness 
so much better. 

I heard a woman say the other day: "Oh, 
that is the way with a girl — taking a fancy to 
some nobody when a nice fellow with money 
wants to marry her." I happened to know 
that the ''nice fellow with money" was 
undersized and decidedly lacking in the upper 
story. I have not seen the "nobody." 
The speaker was not consciously immoral. 
In her creed the money made the little autom- 
aton a "nice fellow." If she had only 
glanced back she might have seen that his 
parents married "sensibly" with a view to 
joining two fortunes, and that this was the 
probable reason for his physical deficiency. 

If the "nobody" whom the girl fancied 



The Marriage Question 107 

was a man — and he probably was — had 
anybody a right to ask her to renounce 
him, and the prospect of being the mother 
of happy, hearty children, for the goods and 
gear the rich man could bestow? Was the 
woman conscious, do you think, of what she 
was really asking the girl to do ? 

But women have lost the real refinement 
of sentiment in the false refinement of their 
education, just as they often lose their con- 
ception of the really artistic in what is ac- 
tually morbid and degenerate. 

They have set up an ideal of ladyhood as 
the thing to worship rather than the true 
type of womanhood, and they have tried to 
forget about the children and our duty to 
them while they are yet unborn. Deliver us 
from the spindle-legged offspring of the 
effete; give us rather the crude progeny of 
the middle class — they, at least, have possi- 
bilities. 

It has been a very popular idea in recent 
years that we must di.scourage romance and 
teach our children wisdom. It is very nec- 
essary to discourage romance, but the dis- 
courager must have a fine eye for distinctions. 



io8 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

Very young girls are likely to get into serious 
trouble through romance, and it surely is 
the duty of parents and guardians to keep 
them from finding heroes on the street cor- 
ners, but I am persuaded we take wrong 
methods of preparing our daughters for the 
disillusion of marriage. We tell a girl that 
it is wise to choose a well-to-do husband, 
as the pretty things he can give her will con- 
sole her for any coldness after the honey- 
moon. Is this not a coarse sentiment ^ 

How much better it would be to talk 
wisely to the girl of the nature and purpose 
of the married state, and warn her of the 
fatal danger of allowing petty things and 
foolish, unworthy ambitions to interfere with 
the plain, unsentimental human attraction of 
man and woman that is to hold them together. 

It is very fortunate when married lovers 
are surrounded by the comforts of life, which 
help us so over the rough places, but pas- 
sionate human-love has always in it a strong 
element of the sacrificial. Our lovers should 
take the joy of their union as a gratuity and 
the pain of it as the strongest tie that binds 
them. 



The Marriage Question 109 

When we have smiled into each other's 
eyes in divine happiness we are betrothed, 
but when we have wept in each other's arms 
in the first misery of our disillusion we are 
married, and standing at the doors of life. 
Let no man put us asunder. 

I sometimes feel disgusted with the ex- 
travagance and display of the modern fash- 
ionable marriage, but I should be less than 
womanly if I did not like some fuss and 
feathers; so, like all women and most good 
men, I like a pretty wedding, but it must be 
a love match, and there must be a shower 
and a trousseau and a dear little house- 
keeping outfit. 

I am glad that I do, and that I always cry 
when they say, "for better, for worse, for 
richer, for poorer, till death us do part" 

— but they are not sorry tears. 

I am tenderly in love with all brides 

— and particularly such as are having 
plain little weddings. Just as the naive 
little wild flower at the old oak's knee is 
infinitely sweeter and more gifted with spirit 
than any hothouse rose, so your little wedding 
has a delicate charm that is smothered in the 



no Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

elaborate details of the rich and extravagant 
wedding — though both couples may love 
and love sincerely. One thing for these 
young people to remember is that the child- 
less marriage, if it be deliberately so, is an 
unholy union; not that the mere production 
of a large family aWays makes the union 
more so. I wish that all the children that 
populate the earth were born in holy mat- 
trimony. But this can only be when parents 
are peculiarly blessed with understanding 
— or when the mother is quickened with the 
divine instinct that brought the halo around 
the face of Mother Mary. 

Happily, for us all, motherhood more 
than any other experience of life endows 
us with the divine, and all the false wisdom 
of the times cannot outweigh the priceless 
knowledge of Nature, which we so often seek 
to turn aside. 

The best thing about a marriage is the 
founding of a new home. A real home is 
God's best gift to man, after the essentials 
of health and the functions of the senses. 
Can we not rear our children with more 
feeling for home life and less ambition for 



The Marriage Question 1 1 1 

figuring in the eyes of their social world ? 
Can we not teach them that the great people 
of the earth are those who are living their 
own lives, little disturbed or flattered by 
the neglect or attention of society, and find- 
ing their best happiness in the home circle. 

Let our children marry with the proper 
ideal of all that home implies — father, 
mother, brothers, and sisters, life's simple 
story briefly told, but never lacking in charm 
for those who are awake and aware. 



IX 

SOME NEEDS OF WOMAN 

SOMETIMES I have a homesick day 
that almost brings me to that " incor- 
porate silence" that Poe tells us about. 
Not that I know what he means by it — 
for I do not, except that it is a scare so fear- 
ful that there are no words for it. Death 
is a mere bagatelle beside it — it is some- 
thing that partakes in no sense of the gentle 
finality of death. Maybe it walks past you 
half seen, half heard in the busy street as it 
did past me yesterday with hurried, muffled 
"pit-pat" and ghastly blind cognisance, 
brushing a tentative, formless feeler toward 
your heart, like a groping thing in the dark 
and almost making you shriek out and get 
yourself, without the least premeditation, 
into an insanity inquest. I think this thing 
which passes me thus, with insolent claim 
upon recognition is the wraith of a gray 



Some Needs of W^oman 113 

existence, joyless, loveless, mirthless, stretch- 
ing out year after year like a dull road be- 
tween flat, dismantled cornfields on a sunless 
November afternoon. I have known happi- 
ness, reader, charm, gaiety, absorption, 
companionship, motherhood, home! But 
what if there are some who live in a constant 
atmosphere of my occasional homesick days ? 
But this would be impossible. The suicide 
rate would increase with alarming rapidity 
and population would dwindle among a cer- 
tain class of people. When we fall victims 
to this homesickness that home and "the 
folks" cannot cure (thank God, it comes 
seldom enough!) it is well to get on the train 
and go where people browse in dingy places 
with the "lean goat of shabby gentility," 
which some modern writer used as a figure 
of speech. 

It seems a somewhat ignoble thing, this 
curing one's affliction by the sight of other 
people's misery, but a day of cheap living in 
the city generally sends me flying home like 
a bird to its nest warm with a sense of cosey- 
ness, of quiet and peace which is the great 
essential of my Hfe. True, I can no longer 



114 Ideas of a Plain Country AA^oman 

lay my head upon mother's knees and feel 
her magnetic hands wandering in blissful, 
soothing upon my hair. True, the man of 
the house does not understand, and fretfully 
states that he is n't feeling very well himself; 
true, the maid is sure to remind me that 
the potatoes are out, and my daughter to 
ask me when I am going to see about her 
new hat; true the patched place in the wall- 
paper which I mean to cover with a sectional 
bookcase when I can afford it, will stare at 
me, and the worn carpet which I have allowed 
a whole generation of young folks to dance 
upon for years, will show its teeth hideously, 
but there is something that never fails to 
respond with rapturous greeting when I run 
for refuge from the crowded store, the vapid 
street, the public eating place, and when the 
door of home closes upon me it shuts out 
this gaunt terror with which it seems to me 
many women live on terms of daily intimacy. 
Sometimes my heart trembles a little at 
the thought. "Will my life ever be gray.? 
Shall I ever be shut between gloomy brick 
walls fighting the city's dinginess by means 
of a cheap white curtain and a pot plant 



Some Needs of Woman 115 

languishing upon the window siil ? Will the 
sound of laughter and happy voices ever 
come to me only as an echo like the shiver 
of broken glass in a silent house?" This 
is hypochondria and I do not often succumb 
to it, but when I do I know that home is 
the first essential of a woman's life 

I saw an article in a magazine entitled 
"The Passing of the Home." It seemed to 
me a blasphemy, but it was only an epigram 
such as we have run to with foolish exaggera- 
tion in late years. Smart sayings are very 
fashionable and we allow them to be startling 
— it gives us a pleasant sensation of the 
nerves — we forget how much immoral 
sentiment is peddled about in this way. The 
funny man must have his joke, even if it 
be at the expense of our most sacred ideals 
of God's evident purposes in thus organising 
a world. 

If home is not an essential in a woman's 
life there is something wrong with her, and 
if love is not necessary to her I believe I do 
not wish to make her acquaintance. It is 
perhaps not quite fair for a woman who has 
lived a full life to write about the needs of 



ii6 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

women. What may we know of people's 
needs when we have so many things which 
thousands of people have not ? I have said 
that a white curtain is a need of my Hfe and 
that it makes me a better woman to see 
freshly laundered curtains at my windows, 
but perhaps I am wrong. Are we always 
better when we feel better ? Perhaps my 
satisfaction in a cheap white curtain is the 
same thing a woman feels when she buys a 
drapery or a bit of bric-a-brac which costs 
many hundreds — maybe after all it is 
only vanity! There is a great question as to 
just how far a woman should follow her 
sense of beauty. My theory on the subject 
is that she should stop at a general harmony 
of colouring. 

I heard a woman say that she lived on 
fried potatoes in order to purchase a set of 
Dresden cups and saucers, and made all 
sorts of sacrifices — resorted to actual jug- 
gling with her allowance and spent davs 
and nights of harassing calculation, which 
finally ended in the possession of several 
fine Oriental rugs. I knew a woman who 
fairly ran her family distracted in her craze 



Some Needs of Woman 



117 



for antique furniture. If she saw a chance 
to get an old mahogany bedstead or a cherry 
wood bureau she would fret and mope until 
her husband, in desperation, would buy it 
for her and pay the exorbitant price of 
having it rehabilitated. But no sooner would 
this be accomplished than a sale of rugs would 
come on and she would find one particularly 
ragged, particularly faded, especially dilapi- 
dated and redolent of camel's dung and 
spices and then all former achievements in 
the line of "beds, tables, and candlesticks" 
would seem as nothing compared with this 
treasure of the Orient. 

I am doubtful that these rugs are worth 
the money we put in them, but admit there 
is a fascination about them as they lie askew 
and tattered upon the hardwood floor — 
they are narcotic, hypnotic, despotic and 
what not, and so when women get educated 
up to them and feel this subtle charm they 
become a need, an absolute need,of awoman's 
life. We can all order our lives to avoid 
these needs, however, and it is our duty to 
do so. We can take a lesson from the Ori- 
ental rug and follow it out in the simple and 



Ii8 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

unpretentious arrangement of our rooms, 
we can avoid pronounced colours, avoid 
glaring newness and keep to a gentle har- 
mony — a quiet effect which is the great 
charm of the Oriental rug. Our grand- 
mothers used to achieve this in the hit and 
miss rag carpet, the dull blue china, and the 
"mulberry" ware once so popular. I re- 
member a set of mulberry plates I used to 
see in an old dining-room long ago. This 
room was low ceiled and wide, with a shiny, 
bare floor, a gaunt old sideboard with pewter 
vessels upon it, a tall clock with a quiet habit 
of letting time get away unnoticed, a hug« 
fireplace with a crane in it, an old armchair 
with the splints in the seat worn to glistening 
slickness, and a drop leaf table against the 
wall. If there was anything in the way of 
floor covering it was a strip of faded "hit 
and miss" in front of the fireplace. The 
mulberry plates we ate our meals from — 
or our dinners at any rate — had the Lord's 
prayer inscribed upon them. There was a 
general monotone of colouring in this room. 
Uncle David sometimes wore a nankeen 
waistcoat and Aunt Ann's best gown was a 



Some Needs of Woman 119 

magenta delaine, but the tones were soft 
— and they soothe my memory like those 
"dim rooms wherein the sunshine is made 
mild " that Riley tells us about. 

I think there is another way around to the 
Oriental rug effect that does not require so 
much worry and striving. It consists merely 
in not wishing for things. I heard a woman 
in a talk upon art say that if a woman had 
her choice between three beautiful hand-made 
chairs and six common ones she must always 
choose the three beautiful ones. I think this 
was false doctrine. It seems to me that it 
would depend entirely upon the number of 
persons to be seated. Chairs are made to 
sit upon, and utility comes first, I should 
hate to be obliged, when I was very tired, 
to stand up or sit on the floor for art's sake, 
but this is a mistake women frequently make 
— they live in discomfort for the sake of things 
that count with other people. I love beautiful 
and artisticthings,buttheyare notan absolute 
need of my life, like three respectable meals 
a day and plenty of bed coveting and a good 
warm fire. Some people have a talent for 
comfort, others a mania for discomfort. 



I20 Ideas of a Plain Country ^A^oman 

I suppose that the needs of a woman's 
heart and hfe are as various as the kinds 
of people it takes to make a world. There are, 
however, some generahties that include all 
manners and conditions of women. I should 
say, taking all things into consideration, that 
the greatest need of a woman's life is a big 
good-hearted boss, a man who knows enough 
to let her have her own way until she under- 
takes to make a fool of herself and then 
stops her. Next, her greatest need is a 
home, no matter whether she thinks so or 
not, a home with plenty of work, plenty of 
care, plenty of responsibility. The irrespon- 
sible lives that women are leading day by day 
— the freedom they are seeking from real 
work of any kind is a menace to the future 
of our race. The tendency to purchase 
ready-cooked food, to eat at clubs and res- 
taurants — in short, to "browse " — is making 
us a race of nomads, pitifully lacking in per- 
manent abiding places. The tendency of 
modern business fosters this unfortunate 
state of affairs. So many men are "on the 
road" so many wives must live through a 
great part of the time as best they may, and 



Some Needs of Woman 121 

women are apt to form the browsing nabit 
when they have n't a lot of people to do for 
— to cook for and plan for every single day. 

Women need beauty in their lives as flow- 
ers need water and sunshine, but many 
women do not know where the real fountain 
of beauty springs up, clear and limpid as 
the fount of Bandusia, in the rock-guarded 
hollow apostrophised by Horace. Appre- 
ciation does not demand possession. I love 
Corot above all other artists, yet I never 
fret because I do not own one of his can- 
vases. I admire Oriental rugs and hand- 
wrought furniture, but I never spend a 
moment in scheming how I might get them. 
The possession of beautiful things is not 
half so good as a real appreciation of beauty 
in the abstract, for this is a treasure that 
neither moth nor rust can corrupt. And 
this is true of other things less tangible than 
floor coverings and house furnishings. 

It is true of love. It is not nearly so 
important to have love as to cherish love's 
perfect ideal and never depart from it, no 
matter how, in life, you may seem to have 
missed it. It is true of religion. Belief, 



122 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

demonstration, experience, none of these is 
worth half so much as a clear conception of 
what religion really is. A woman said to 
me not long ago: "If you had religion you 
would be a saint." I felt a powerful glad- 
ness in the lack she seemed to notice, for if 
there is anything I don't want to be it is a 
saint. But my friend misunderstood me. 
I have religion in the broadest sense, because 
I appreciate religion. I wish women had 
less of it and men more — we should then 
have a better world. 

The great need of women's lives just at 
the present time is that they lay aside am- 
bitions for the sake of real appreciations. 
That they stop doing things for the name 
of the thing. Women need to stop dread- 
ing being behind the procession. If you 
get far enough behind so as not to have to 
take its dust you will feel as if you had 
been born again into a new heaven and a 
new earth. The wonders of the world will 
be new to you — you will be a child, walk- 
ing once more amid the miracles of liv- 
ing. If you can get out of the smug atmos- 
phere of up-to-date smartness, the chit-chat 



Some Needs of Woman 123 

effect of familiarity with "what the world 
is doing" and feel life to be a thing apart 
from movements and organizations and so- 
ciety, an individual thing, all your own, you 
may know that you are beginning to come 
to life. 

Keep a place on the floor sacred to the 
Oriental rug — but never get the rug, for 
then you would see how little it is worth. 
Acquiring expensive possessions is like see- 
ing a fairy. The charm of the little wild- 
wood place, where the ferns are growing, is 
in the fact that just as you got there the 
fairies scampered away. Be poor and quarrel 
about it, and make up and be happy over 
it, and set the dreams going again. Do not 
fret if your neighbour does not have to work. 
The road to great-heartedness is not an easy 
one, and women particularly need to find it. 



X 

THE TRUTH ABOUT LOVE 

A LITERARY man said to me not long 
ago: "Why is it that you tell the 
truth about everything but love ?" I hate to 
be snipped up this way by a pointed question, 
and I felt exactly as I should if he had asked 
me what is the capital of Abyssinia, or who 
was the author of some quotation, madden- 
ingly familiar, yet, for the time at least, es- 
caped from my memory. I gasped a little and 
then felt a sudden sinkingof the heart, because 
if I have n't told the truth it is because I do 
not know it. I am a most consistent truthful 
James, having taken my cue in early life 
from a note a man wrote to me one Sep- 
tember day — say thirty years ago. A day 
with a quality of tangible gold in the sun- 
shine, a divine mist out on the hills, where 
it seemed such a pity one could n't be walk- 
ing with her beloved instead of going to 
124 



The Truth About Love 125 

high school. However, the note was some- 
thing. In regard to some mild fibbing I 
had done for his sake, he reprimanded me. 
"Let me say to you," he wrote, "in the 
words of Daddy Sherman to his troops. 
'Don't tell any more lies than are strictly 
necessary.'" I took the lesson to heart 
and have made truth more or less a study 
ever since. 

To be hauled up and requested to tell 
the truth about love partakes distinctly of 
the day of judgment. There is a dreadful 
silence, which the prisoner at the bar is 
expected to break by some statement cred- 
itable to himself, and the poor fellow stand- 
ing with drooping head and downcast eyes, 
cannot think of a word to say, and finally, 
in desperation, stammers out "guilty," 
though perhaps in reality he is n't a bad 
fellow at all. Fortunately, the Great Judge 
knows better than we do what constitutes 
guilt. My position in regard to love is Hke 
that of many people regarding ghosts — 
they believe in them, and have seen several 
things which they can't quite explain, but 
if you pin them down closely and ask; them 



126 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

if they have actually seen a ghost they will 
hem and haw, and look mysterious, but 
they will not make any sworn statements. 

The sex attraction is happily in a measure 
governed by laws both on the statute and 
unwritten, and the only pity is that it cannot 
be still more subject to legal intervention. 
The family usually has its origin in the union 
of a young couple irresistibly drawn together 
by the sex attraction. Fortunately, very 
often there is also a real affection between 
the two which grows stronger with the years, 
a deathless love, bound by a thousand name- 
less little ties,besidesthe great bonds of mutual 
passion and the holy union of parentage. I 
fully believe that the vast majority of coup- 
les marry with very little correct idea of love, 
and it is just as well that they should, for many 
whom I have known who have sat in the 
sunshine of youth waiting patiently for great 
love to come riding by have seen the sun- 
shine fade and the weather of life grow gray 
and windbeaten, and have finally at the 
end picked up some poor straggler from 
Love's retinue and sought desperately to 
make a prince of him. 



The Truth About Love 127 

We are all of us a little weak, a little silly 
on the subject of love, or if we are not we 
ought to be — heaven deliver us from the 
cynic who sneers at love — let all men 
despise him, all women flee from him. Now, 
if it is the truth I must tell, I believe that 
most men love their wives, but have a poor 
way of showing it, and that most women 
love their husbands and have demonstrated 
the fact until the man would rather read the 
paper or talk about something else. He 
ought n't to do this, because there is sure 
to come a time when he will regret it — but 
love is long, and time is fleeting, and we are 
all of us such ingrates that we will in course 
of time become matter of fact over any 
commodity, however important, when there 
is such a lot of it. A man likes to seek for 
something that involves competition, and 
here is this woman pouring out treasures 
of love at his feet — this woman who 
would n't for all the world look at another 
man, who has n't a single interest that 
does n't involve him, who weeps if he does n't 
kiss her and who loves him — loves him 
— loves him! 



128 Ideas of a Plain Country ^Voman 

The first thing a woman should do when 
she loves a man like that, all things being 
propitious, or not being either, for the mat- 
ter of that, is to bear a child of his. This 
is another subject upon which no woman 
has ever told the truth, or ever intends to, 
perhaps, but that is another story. Having 
borne this child, the woman has welded 
the lifelong bond — there is no time after 
that to speculate about love, and no need 
of such speculation, thank God, in a good 
woman's life. Of all the phrases that flash 
like torches in the pages of that wise Bible 
none is more illuminating than the expression :- 
"A little child shall lead them." And no 
legend of all our lore is more deeply sug- 
gestive than that the wise men brought their 
best homage to a little child. How many 
children have saved theirfather's andmother's 
souls, who can imagine ? 

The child that is born of love will be 
beautiful, happy, and good. There will be 
a noble serenity in its nature and on its 
face, and if the mother loved the father as 
good women love she will love the child as 
good mothers love, and there will never be 



The Truth About Love 



129 



any question of disruption in that family, 
especially if in due season more children 
are born into the home. It is true that 
men and women with families sometimes 
forget, and depart from the duties of people 
who have taken upon themselves such holy 
obligations, but heaven is kind, and it is 
not often that such things occur, and we have 
only to look at the miseries that follow upon 
a transgression of the social law to see how 
immeasurably it pays to follow the long, 
straight road. A woman who has children 
has a life work, and whoever has a life work 
has happiness, the harder the work the better. 
I am not a believer in woman's rights in 
the common acceptance of the term, but I 
do believe in marriage as a partnership in 
which the woman must bear her share of 
the load. Man's natural comrade in the 
battle of life is a woman, and she should be a 
healthy, normal woman with strong legs and 
useful hands and big brains and a heart for 
any fate. He should place her behind him 
in the fight, but she must know how to load 
the guns and have them ready to his hand, 
and she must know how to die when the 



130 Ideas of a Plain Country \A*^onian 

time comes and to help him die if she 
must. 

This reminds me of a httle story of mar- 
ried hfe. A couple were married and lived 
on a little farm. Two children were born, 
and when they were half-grown the man 
was stricken with consumption. For a time 
they tried to ignore it. But as time went on 
glances would pass between them, in which the 
dreadful thought was inarticulately spoken. 
Finally, they came to talking of it, and to 
planning how she would manage with the 
farm and the boys when he was gone. The 
woman decided to be brave, and this helped 
the man, though he was young and did not 
wish to die. One day he was better than 
he had been for months, and a little ray of 
sunshine fell into their gloomy cavern of 
despair. They decided that he was going 
to get well, and in celebration of the new 
hope, they hitched up and drove to visit 
some relatives several miles away, for it 
was a Sunday, and there was a little leisure. 
They had a joyful visit, but on their return, 
while unhitching the horses, the man was 
seized with a hemorrhage. The end came 



The Truth About Love 131 

so swiftly that there was no time to summon 
aid. She was alone on that remote little 
farm, with the two little boys and her dying 
husband. She just had courage to place 
the oldest boy on one of the horses and send 
him for help before she broke down — it 
had caught her with her defences down; 
the little ray of hope had unnerved her. 
But the dying man had still the power to 
speak to her, and he said: "Wife, you must 
not desert me like that — you must come 
and help me die." In a moment she was 
calm. The old, familiar call of love had 
steadied her. When the neighbours arrived 
he was gone, and the woman who had helped 
him die was ready for whatever else life had 
for her to do. This is a phase of love and 
its possibilities, and there are other phases 
requiring almost, but not quite, so much 
courage. Death is the final trial. We think 
that there are worse things — we fancy it 
would be easier to bury our beloved than 
to find him unfaithful to us, but it is not so. 
So strong is the tie of the mortal body that 
anything is better than death. 

In speaking of love, I am, naturally. 



1^2 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

speaking of woman's love. In all matters 
pertaining to sex, women are stronger than 
men. If the moral sense of women were 
not infinitely stronger than that of men, 
society would soon become chaotic. If 
women were not truer than men, stronger to 
resist temptation, more loyal to their homes 
and more devoted to their children, moral- 
ity would languish and free love would flour- 
ish like the green bay tree. 

As we grow older we are more and more 
sensible of the wise provision of Nature in 
many things. Most women, after marriage, 
lose their youthful charm. They look mar- 
ried. They lose interest in preening their 
feathers, and the cares of a family soon rub 
off the downy, elusive, seductive charm of 
the young girl. Sometimes this seems a 
pity, but we who know life as it is, know that 
it is well. The little mother must go in sober 
guise. She must walk softly and gravely 
along, and she must be shielded and guarded 
— there must be dozens of reasons why the 
door of youth, once closed upon her shall not 
reopen. A thousand little tendernesses and 
loyalties bind her husband to her. If her 



The Truth About Love 133 

cheeks are a little wan and the curl falls out 
of her pretty hair, it is for his sake, and 
if I were a man, the last thing I should 
deliberately choose would be a very handsome 
and attractive wife. Like an expensive 
jewel, it would be a risky possession. Many 
beautiful women are reasonably free from 
vanity and strongly fortified with moral 
sense; many more are not. A pretty woman 
is more likely to come to grief than any 
other creature saving a very bright and tal- 
ented man, so it is well for us, if our wives are 
just dear girls, healthy and happy and 
making a fair show among the other women 
of the club or the Ladies' Aid Society. 

The real test of love comes at middle age. 
I have long ago ceased to question divine 
intelligence, but I do wonder why the most 
crucial cares of a woman's life come to her 
at a time when she is least able to bear them. 
Just as the wheels of youth begin to run 
down and the cruel realisation of harden- 
ing features, whitening hair, lagging step 
and stoutening form begins to hll the mother's 
mind with apprehension and affect her body 
with nervous depression, some daughter is 



134 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

marrying, some boy cutting capers at col- 
lege, some child graduating, or, worse still, 
some dismaying grandchild inconsiderately 
being born. I have noticed in my brief span 
of years — for I have been a noticing child, 
and that is something creditable — remem- 
ber, recording angel, to put it down — that 
if a man is going to make a fool of himself 
at all, he generally does it at middle age. 
He is seized with a sudden terror lest life 
should get away without his having made 
the most of it. When I see a man taking 
this kind of a turn at a time when nothing 
on earth but sobriety, devotion to his fam- 
ily and to the ties of domestic life can pre- 
serve his dignity and tide him safely over 
into venerable, grand old age, I almost believe 
in a personal devil. It is such a clever move 
for the tempter to whisper in his ear: 

The bird of life is singing in the sun, 
Short is his song — nor only just begun. 
A call, a trill, a rapture, then so soon 
A silence, and the song is done, is done. 

This strikes upon the ear of middle age 
with poignant meaning. Perhaps we have 
not heard the sweetest notes of that song — 



The Truth About Love 135 

perhaps, oh maddening thought — life has 
not unfolded to us the dearest page — we 
feel a sense of nonfulfilment and the shud- 
dering thought that one is so long dead! 
At such a time common sense is a jewel 
beyond price, and if there is n't a large lump 
of it around in the family there is likely to 
be a muss. Men and women should know 
that love, more than any other thing, is a 
duty. It is a thing to be cultivated and 
guarded, and the man who by slow neglect 
and indifference allows the impassable wall 
of a woman's pride to grow between him 
and her is the greatest fool on earth. He 
should, for selfish motives if no higher ones, 
have kept her love so well that when the 
temptations — the weaknesses that are so 
purely masculine, and which men so fatally 
mistake for strength — assail him, he can 
fly to her as the Hebrews of old ran to their 
cities of refuge, and she is but a poor wife 
if there is not enough of the maternal in her 
love to receive him with forbearance, pa- 
tience, and pardon rather than with the pride 
and bitterness of a slighted love. Life would 
be a beautiful thing if we all preserved our 



136 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

fealties inviolate to the end. But we do 
fairly well, considering our environment and 
our purblind state into which the light of 
truth glimmers as through a glass darkly. 

At middle age a woman is likely to assume 
a slighted and down-trodden air because 
she feels so strongly the change in her own 
appearance. She is on the lookout for 
neglect, she feels a horrid jealousy of younger, 
prettier women. Frequently she puts trea- 
sonable ideas into her husband's head by 
reiterating the question if he loves her as he 
used to do. The truth is, women change 
but little in their husband's eyes. Think 
of your mother's face and say whether you 
noticed when it changed from youth to age 
— was it not mother's face all through the 
years, and when you saw it for the last time 
in her coffin was it not as beautiful as when 
your baby eyes first beheld it, long and long ago ? 
So most men feel toward their wives; it is the 
real women that they love, the gracious and 
comforting presence, the confidence, the near- 
ness that means home and rest and peace. 

By the time a woman reaches middle age 
she should have provided herself with a 



The Truth About Love 



'37 



thousand resources of purely personal in- 
terest. She should be a woman of affairs, 
an independent citizen of the commonwealth, 
an intelligent denizen of the world. She 
should have cultivated individuality with 
success. She is but a dull pupil in the school 
of life if she has not learned that in our dis- 
cipline we may at any moment be called 
upon to give up the very nearest and dearest 
thing in our lives. For this reason we 
should have many near and dear things, that 
we may not be totally bereft. 

I think a little spice of the "Old Nick" 
is as good a thing as a woman can keep 
about her. It is well enough for husband 
and children to have to hunt their holes 
sometimes and to know that this gracious 
person who can make such excellent coffee, 
such incomparable biscuits, such straw- 
berry jam, and can so deliciously bathe 
one's feet and soothe an aching head, can 
on occasion go on a rampage calculated to 
make the devils believe and tremble. A 
sense of humour should be cherished as a 
means of grace. A man hates ridicule and 
he dreads the keen steel of his wife's pene- 



1^8 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

trating glance when she sees straight through 
him, and he knows it. The rear view of 
a man as he shnks away, knowing that his 
wife is laughing at him is a sight of mingled 
humour and pathos, there is such a sugges- 
tion of caudal appendage, meekly disposed 
in canine fashion, that the laugh melts to 
tenderness — maternal tenderness for eter- 
nal boyhood, and she will cook something 
good for his supper as sure as the world. 

There are many chapters in the book of 
love; much contention as to what love is; 
many heresies are promulgated by the men- 
tally unsound and the physically morbid 
and those who have been unfortunately 
mated for life. But we cannot accept these 
as typical. We must believe that love 
flourishes at its best in the married state, 
that love means father, mother, children 
and home. The best thing that can happen 
to any woman is that the one man of her life 
come into it early and remain late. It is 
a bad thing for a girl to have many lovers, 
and I know of nothing more disturbing or 
dangerous in a woman's life than a broken 
love afi^air. Occasionally a young couple 



The Truth About Love 139 

who, by every law of great nature and the 
social welfare, should have been married, 
are separated. Each marries another and, 
because they are good people they live in 
comparative happiness, but they never for- 
get. Nightfall seldom comes but she whis- 
pers half unconsciously: "God bless him, 
wherever he is," and the firelight scarcely 
flickers upon his hearth without bringing 
him a fancy of her face in the gathering 
shadows. This situation is one among the 
unwritten tragedies and takes rank with 
splendid sorrows that are dearer than joys. 
A generous proportion of absence, a large 
separation by land and sea, is the proper 
treatment for such a malady. In such a 
case with seeming impiety we must revise the 
law and say: "What man has joined to- 
gether let not God put asunder." Though 
God who created us male and female and 
gave to us the instinct — nay the com- 
mand — for union seems to be the dumb 
thing we are smothering in our hearts, for 
the sake of human reason and law. 

There are instances of the grande passion; 
of love that transcends the understanding 



140 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

of average mortals. Occasionally it comes 
to great people who are strong enough to 
break over v^hat they deem the puny social 
law with seeming impunity. They have 
the personal courage to meet the sure dis- 
illusion that follows after union, and they are 
usually people who are masters of some 
divine art which can console them and keep 
them great and calm and courageous to the 
end. Personally, between them this high- 
handed disregard of laws that they argue 
were made for little people seems all right. 
But their influence and example to little 
people is hugely wrong. We have a duty 
toward the little people, and must temper 
our teachings to their understandings. In 
every phase of life the great must be sacri- 
ficed to the small. The good, the patient, 
the true must serve the petty, the narrow, 
and selfish. The salvation of the poor comes 
through the destruction of the rich, and 
princes must fall that peasants may rise. 
Thus we must sacrifice sometimes what seems 
ours by almost supernal right, for the sake 
of duller souls, that their illumination may 
come the sooner. 



The Truth About Love 141 

It is the business, then, of all good men 
and women that love should pertain to the 
married state, that it be held above intrigue 
and that divorce for any but the gravest 
causes be held a crime unpardonable. If, 
in our personal experience there is longing 
and renunciation, some shadow of regret, 
we must not take our case as typical. Love, 
like religion, must have a high ideal, far be- 
yond our human grasp, but ever before us, 
drawing us to some sense of nearness to 
it. "We are our longing" and perhaps 
some day, broken with the cares of life and 
crushed by a sense of defeat, we may wake 
to find our longing verified and ourself the 
creature we wished to be. 



xr 

OLD MAIDS AND SINGLE WOMEN 

ALL old maids do not remain single. 
Mylo Jones's wife was one, and I 
have known others who accidentally got 
into the married state and even gave per- 
functory nourishment to families of pre- 
cocious, unchildlike offspring. 

Likewise I have known splendid matronly 
women v/ho have lived single when they 
should by all indications of nature have been: 

Wooed and married and a 
Kissed and carried awa'. 

Perhaps this was what they were wait- 
ing for. But they should not have waited 
too long. Some girls are wedded by tumul- 
tuous wooing, but after waiting a reasonable 
length of time a woman ought to take her 
destiny into her own hands and pick up 

some good fellow who would hardly have 

142 



Old Maids and Single Women 143 

the courage to ask her if she had n't let him 
know it would be agreeable. 

Many single women remain so because 
they do not see an opportunity to make 
what their friends would consider a suitable 
marriage. There are comparatively few suit- 
able marriages, and yet the vast majority 
of them do well enough. We can't have 
things too suitable in this world. Harmony 
is a fine thing, but it can grow monotonous. 
Some people who are imminently well suited 
in temperament, rehgion, and social stand- 
ing are dull and have children of distressing 
mediocrity. When a woman has made an 
unsuitable marriage she has provided herself 
with a life work, and that is more than most 
old maids have. I was never cut out for an 
old maid. I could n't be one. The avo- 
cations to which they lend their energies 
are all out of my line. I never could bear 
to go to temperance meeting or teach a Sun- 
day-school class or sit up with the sick or 
teach school or do hand sewing or read an 
improving book. There must be some- 
thing doing or I fall into a green and yel- 
low melancholy. Fortunately, I have never 



144 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

had much time for melancholy. The affairs 
of life have been so urgent that there was 
no chance for repining. 

On one side of the house I come of a 
family somewhat noted for single women. 
For generations back there have been old 
maids in the family, and some of them in 
a rather virulent form. I remember Cousin 
Peggy, who was a terror. She had a red 
head and a sharp tongue, and when we saw 
her coming, riding at a gallop on her old 
sorrel mare and looking for all the world 
like a witch on a broomstick, a change 
came over the spirit of our dreams and life 
seemed suddenly not so tenderly radiant as it 
had before. How she peppered us with 
sarcasms and humiliated us with shrewd 
questionings about the Scriptures. How she 
loved to let our beaux know that we pow- 
dered our faces and were slow about darning 
our stockings! 'How she did enjoy telling 
what she would do if she had a family, and 
how young people used to conduct them- 
selves when she was a girl! 

Cousin Peggy lived in one of the most 
romantic places I have ever seen. First you 



Old Maids and Single Women 145 

came to a mill with pollard willows along 
the race, then you came to Cousin Peggy's 
house, which was a log one, with queer 
little upstairs windows and a latticed ver- 
anda. A little brook ran through the yard 
and there was a rustic bridge across it. 
Then you came to the old, old brick church 
of Shemeriah, with its big grove of trees and 
its quaint little "session house" in the yard, 
its graveyard where "the mossy marbles rest," 
and its week-day air of mystery. There 
was a long stretch of green between the 
church and Cousin Peggy's house and the 
sunshine had a way of dreaming there on 
a summer afternoon that nearly made you 
homesick when you were a little girl and 
hundreds of miles away from mother. Sun- 
shine has a way of emphasising distances 
with its reminiscent afternoon quality. 
Cousin Peggy had a sister who made an 
unsuitable marriage, died of it, and left three 
little girls for her to rear. They were shy 
little creatures, as quiet as mice, but despite 
Cousin Peggy's vigorous chaperonage they 
all married. I remember thinking they 
would as I saw them walk meekly across the 



146 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

green to church, they were slender Httle 
things with white hands and big, dark eyes 
— some way no spot is so secluded as to 
hide from masculine eyes a charming young 
maid with a delicate air. I never saw their 
mother, but used to marvel that she could 
have been a sister to angular orthodox, disa- 
greeable Presbyterian Peggy. 

As for Cousin Eliza, she was different. 
She was unmarried and lived to be past 
eighty, as Cousin Peggy did, but though she 
had no abiding place and "lived around" 
among the relationship, people were always 
glad to see her. She owned her own saddle 
horse and carried her wardrobe in a carpet 
sack, riding about wherever she choose and 
staying three months at a time. She was 
a homey sort of person, cheerful and clever — 
a person who seemed to fit in in almost any 
household, and to be an ornament to any 
dinner table in times of presbytery or wedding 
festivities. She lived a luxurious life, for 
though she always took a hand at sewing 
or other ladylike work, and was great at 
managing the servants tactfully and looking 
after company and assisting in many ways, 



Old Maids and Single Women 147 

she lived in the old times when actual labour 
was unknown to the white women of her 
state, for she was a typical *' maiden lady" 
of old Virginia. I used to wonder if she 
ever felt any sense of disappointment in life, 
but never heard her express any, never saw 
her in a dejected mood, or noticed upon her 
strong-featured, handsome face a shade of 
disappointment or yearning after the ful- 
filment of woman's destiny. 

In thinking of her, however, it is with an 
involuntary sigh of pity for her that she 
missed being mated, missed the sense of 
home-coming loved ones at twilight, the 
passion of the warm little child's body close 
to her breast, the groping of moist little hands 
reading lines of love on her face, the little 
voice stumbling toward language and telling 
so much more than it will ever be able to 
express after it has mastered it! 

Life does not bring destiny to all of us, 
just as the tree does not bring fruit to every 
blossom, and I suppose that there are com- 
pensations for the maiden state, or we would 
not see so many placid faces among them. 

In recent years there has been much said 



148 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

in praise of the bachelor maid, much prat- 
ing about women's disinclination to give up 
their "freedom" and marry. It is true that 
the opprobrium of old maid is now removed 
from them. It is no longer taken for granted 
that a woman remains single for lack of 
opportunity to marry, though this is just 
about as true as it ever was. All women will 
marry if the right man comes along, but some 
of them do not know that any man who will 
do at all is the right one. A husband is 
what you believe him to be. We all know 
men whom their wives call James and Wil- 
liam and Samuel, who are Jim and Bill arid 
Sam to their fellow-men. When a good 
woman marries a man she dignifies him, 
and it rests with her whether he keeps this 
endowment of idealisation. 

Men take very irrational attitudes on the 
marriage question. They invariably feel 
that it is a reproach to a woman if she desires 
to marry. Doubtless they are in a position 
to wonder what she wants with a man. 
Men nearly always rage at the thought of 
their daughters marrying, and a man gen- 
erally goes to the marriage of his eldest 



Old Maids and Single ^A^omen 149 

daughter in an anguished frame of mind, 
evinced by his pale and miserable counte- 
nance. This can only be because he knows 
how unworthy almost any man is of a sweet, 
pure, well-brought-up girl. 

It is also because of man's persistent 
misunderstanding of the dignity and holi- 
ness of the functions of life. Men persist 
in being jocose over matters of sex, in making 
the most mysterious and Godlike things of 
life the subject of ribald jest, coarse allusion, 
innuendo, and satirical remark. But as he 
takes the woman to protect her from the 
hardships of life, so she takes him to save 
his soul, to hold him to some sense of the 
holy purposes of our being, to forgive his 
defective insight into things as they are and 
place her love as a shield between him and 
that element of mankind to whom little is 
sacred — men who have forgotten, if they 
ever learned them, the lines they groped after 
on their mother's faces. 

I was brought up in an atmosphere of fem- 
ininity. Hoopskirts and Balmoral petti- 
coats were encamped around me. At my 
grandmother's home there were only herself 



150 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

and three maiden daughters. My uncle, 
who lived just above the orchard, vv^as a 
"man body," it is true, but though he was 
huge in stature and had big red whiskers, 
he somehow seemed one of the girls 
when we all sat around the old dining-table 
after dinner and discussed foreordination, 
election, and free agency. I received much 
goodly council from all of the dear women 
who had a hand in my bringing up, and 
hope I profited by it — but I have learned 
t nearly all I know by doing what they told 
|me not to. I never had a beau at my grand- 
mother's but once, and he was from Virginia, 
where old maids were taken as a matter of 
course. In those days Indiana was the 
"West" — and in the West old maids were 
so rare as to be regarded with a sort of 
awe, and no young man of my acquaintance 
would have dared to visit me and brave the 
array of maiden propriety that surrounded 
me. 

One summer evening I started to walk 
from my home in the village to my grand- 
mother's, a mile out in the country, to stay 
all night. One often hears of the lax dis- 



Old Maids and Single W^omen 151 

cipline of to-day, compared with that of the 
days our of youth, but in recalling this little 
episode, it seems a wonder that my mother 
would allow me to do this. It was a lonely 
road with woods on either side, and to-day 
I would not allow my daughter to take the 
same walk alone at twilight. But in those 
days we had never heard of a tramp and 
the Negro terror was unknown. I did not 
take the walk alone, however, because as 
I passed a certain house (oh, it was too 
good to be true!) a young man snatched 
up his cap from the edge of the porch where 
he was sitting and came flying after me. 
When I told him where I was going he 
proposed to accompany me and spend the 
evening with me at grandmother's. 

I do not know why a woman cannot for- 
get the future and enjoy the passing hour 
as a man does, or rather I do know why, 
and it is a blessed thing for her that she is 
so constituted, but I could scarcely enjoy 
that lovely walk through the long summer 
twilight for thinking how it would be when 
we got there. I had some faint hope that 
grandmother would be in bed, but I knew 



152 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

that they would never allow me to sit out 
in the barrel-stave hammock by the cedar- 
trees. At best we could only hope for the 
parlour with the best lamp lighted and smell- 
ing of kerosene and the unfriendly Wind- 
sor chairs. 

They were very hospitable at grand- 
mother's. The house sits far back from the 
road, and a little path runs from the gate 
downhill and up again between a double 
row of ragged, storm-beaten old cedar-trees. 
This long distance to the gate had its dis- 
advantages on dewy summer mornings, when 
the ladies filed out to start for church and 
must hold up their voluminous petticoats 
quite beyond the line of propriety, disclosing 
cloth gaiters and white "clocked" stockings. 
Fortunately there was no masculine eye to 
see save that of my uncle, who looked the 
other way. There was an immense advan- 
tage, however, in noting the approach of 
company and being able to brush one's hair 
and put on a clean white apron and assume 
a look of composure by the time they reached 
the front door. My friend and I were so 
loth to come to the end of our walk that there 



Old Maids and Single Women 153 

was ample time for each member of the 
family to assume a holiday air in time to 
greet us with great placidity. Grandmother 
had not thought of going to bed, and had 
got on her best cap and cape. Even my 
three little cousins, who had scampered down 
from their house on seeing our approach, 
had been hastily mopped with shiny soap 
and had their hair slicked back conspicu- 
ously. They all met us at the door and 
escorted us into the parlour, where the lamp 
had already been lit. We used a candle 
on summer evenings to read the chapter 
and go to bed by. 

They were all very glad to see my friend 
■ — it seemed to me their welcome was al- 
most oppressive. There were just six of the 
Windsor chairs, and we each had one. 
There seemed to be a great many of my 
aunts; their dresses, held out by their hoops, 
made a festoon almost around the room. 
My oldest cousin sat on a three-legged stool 
and stared solemnly at the young man, while 
the two smaller ones took turns backing up 
against the aunts and making their hoops 
tilt precariously. My young friend was a 



154 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

very affable fellow, and talked Virginia with 
my elders while I sat and looked absently 
at the daguerreotypes on the table. 

Finally, at nine o'clock he said he must be 
going. The family went once more in a 
body to the door to speed the parting guest. 
There was a moon by this time seeking 
through the cedar walk for something, like 
Omar's moon in the garden on a summer 
night. My friend was going away to college 
the next morning. My heart sank as he 
shook hands with the fine ladies and even 
the three shy children. Then he turned to 
me and very blandly requested me to walk 
out to the gate with him. My eldest aunt 
indulgently said I might, and added that the 
children might go along to come back with 
me. But my youngest aunt, she of the soft 
blue eyes and pretty brown hair, gently 
put her arms around the children and drew 
them back, saying it was time they were in 
bed. 

She died, unmarried, at the age of thirty- 
seven, but she was not an old maid, and I 
know she has gone to heaven, where "the 
solitary are set in families." 



XII 

A CHAPTER FOR MEN TO READ 

WHEN a woman starts out to live her 
own life she is contemplating a long, 
rough journey. There will be many beau- 
ties along the way, many pitfalls, many 
dangers, and, worse than all, many beauti- 
ful mirages that will lure her over dead 
wastes of desert sands on fruitless quests 
and leave her alone under the wide canopy 
of heaven, that comes down so close on the 
desert — alone and ready to die. No man 
liveth unto himself. We are constituted a 
gregarious race. We must have friends, 
companions, people to love. Women nat- 
urally want people to work for, to sacrifice 
themselves for, to enfold in their voluminous 
mantle of love, to shelter and protect with the 
maternal heart that has always room for 
one more, always patience with the erring, 
always forgiveness for the wicked. 
155 



156 Ideas of a Plain Country ^A(^oman 

But more needful than sacrifice to a 
woman's nature, is the steadfast love of 
a strong man. The feeling of being taken 
care of — the safety of the "house-band," 
the natural protector, the provider — the 
man. Let no woman's rights woman dare 
to ridicule this feminine instinct, or affirm 
that in her career of speech-making and 
meeting men on terms of "equality" she 
has found anything better than a good man's 
love, or that there is any state of affairs, 
or domestic arrangement that exceeds the 
happiness of a comfortable home with father, 
mother, and children. I would write a book 
on the duties of fatherhood if I thought the 
men would read it, but they would n't. 
Good fathers would n't need it and as for 
bad one^ 

I have just lost a friend who was an ideal 
father. Of course, he was a gentleman. 
An ideal father could not be otherwise. 
Have you noticed how few heads of houses 
are really ornaments to their homes ? How 
few men feel the responsibility regarding 
the atmosphere of home or realise that 
one of the most sacred duties in life is that of 



A Chapter for Men to Read 157 

looking after the way in which wife and daugh- 
ters find their happiness ? Men will tell 
you that it takes all their time to make a 
living, to foot the bills their families make, 
to furnish money for the insatiate demands 
of the women folk. Doubtless this arises 
from a mistake in the start — a lack of in- 
terest in little details of home. The want 
of loving consultation over necessities and 
possible luxuries may have brought about 
this unhappy state of affairs. Sullenness 
over bills, rather than gentle and kindly 
explanations, may make bigger bills next 
year. Make your women love you and you 
will learn how eager they are to help, how 
quick to make sacrifices. 

A wise mother is a wonderful thing, but 
a wise and kind father is fairly too good to 
be true. Most men turn the responsibility 
of bringing up the children over to the 
mother. They stand ready to punish them 
if they do wrong or to lecture them for 
faults which, in all probability, the chil- 
dren inherit from them, but they do not take 
a hand in the earliest training of the babies' 
minds. They think it too trivial. They 



158 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

are willing to let the child's first impressions 
of father be of a gloomy presence, envel- 
oped in the evening paper — a presence 
v^hich demanded tiptoe and sign language 
and a little shadow on mother's face. How 
different is the father who realises his great 
responsibility, and at the same time allows 
the blessings which God has given him 
to be dear to him! 

The friend of whom I just now spoke had 
a proper sense of the true sphere of man- 
hood. He knew that paternity was a great 
privilege, a holy thing never to be spoken of 
in a ribald jest, or treated as a mere incident 
in the life of a man. Having given life to 
his children he knew it to be his duty to live 
with them and for them and to impart to 
them all that life meant to him. He knew 
better than to read selfishly, learn selfishly, 
develop selfishly. He knew how to become 
as a little chlid, to join in his children's 
plays, to read to them, talk to them, and 
his favourite song when he rocked them to 
sleep was, "I Hear Thee Speak of a Better 
Land." I heard his daughter after she had 
grown children of her own say that when 



A Chapter for Men to Read 159 

she was ill the first thing she wanted was 
to hear her father sing that sweet, illogical, 
old-fashioned song. Have you ever, when 
you were very ill, had a big man with rough, 
strong, gentle hands lift you about in the 
bed ? If that man were father, brother, 
husband, there was only one thing more 
comforting and that was the thought of 
God's everlasting arms. Men have the op- 
portunity to be this infinite, inexpressibly 
dear thing to the women of their famiUes. 
How many of them miss the opportunity 
— who is going to tell ? Not the wives, > 
mothers, sisters who miss this beauty out 
of their lives. No! They will keep the secret, 
and hold to the ideal, for without the ideal 
we cannot live. I know no deeper bitter- 
ness than the lack of the manly presence 
in a woman's life, no more crucial disillusion 
than the discovery that the man with whom 
she has formed a life partnership neither 
knows nor cares about the holiness and 
beauty of a home and love and domestic 
life. He may have a sort of off-hand feel- 
ing of responsibility for "my wife and the 
kids," and it may mean more to him than 



i6o Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

his behaviour indicates — indeed it doesmean 
more. There is something in the training 
and associations of men that leads them to 
take this Hght attitude toward holy things 
— God knows what it is — the same thing 
that leads them to think it smart to smoke 
and chew tobacco and play poker and have 
liaisons with servant girls and do all sorts of 
weak, unworthy, unmanly things. Maybe 
it is the devil, but one dare not believe in 
the devil if he is going to believe in God. 

At any rate, it is a fact that love of home and 
family lies closer to the heart of the average 
man than appears from his actions, and 
as women, with two-thirds of life's patience 
and faith and strength of character in our 
make-up, we must always take this to be a 
fact, even when man's carelessness, his cold- 
ness, his negligence of duty is at its worst. 
Even when we are famishing for the word 
of love he will not give us, we must try to 
remember what a spendthrift man is, per- 
sistently flinging his birthright to the winds, 
fatuously waiting till it is gone to weep for 
his loss in sackcloth and ashes. In our 
daily bitterness over what we have missed 



A Chapter for Men to Read i6i 

in life we say to ourselves that such love 
is not worth having. We quote from George 
Eliot: "I have long since lost faith in the 
love that has ceased to express itself." We 
arm ourselves in reserve and pride and go 
ahead fiercely beating a path for ourselves 
along the wilderness of life's injustices. 
But this love is worth something:- We find 
that out, sometimes, after we have lost it. 
This love that has ceased to express itself 
springs to life in an emergency — and in 
any case it is better than anything a woman 
can substitute for it. Let women remem- 
ber this. The position of a true, self-re- 
specting, quiet wife is an unassailable one, 
and from any point of view far exceeds that 
of the divorcee, no matter with how "strong'* 
a hand she may have taken hold of life. I 
have heard women say: *'I would not allow 
any man to spoil my life." It is a praise- 
worthy sentiment, but is better in the living 
than in the expression. Remember, you are 
living your life for yourself, not for the 
grandstand. 

Most women live along happily, day by 
day, without pausing to take an inventory 



i62 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

of the stock on hand. They quarrel with 
their husbands, have httle reconcihations, 
and, in a general way, live, breathe, and have 
their being in the light of their eyes. They 
make no plans without them. But occa- 
sionally a woman is brought up short to 
take a look around and see what she can 
do to make life worth living. She considers 
her assets. The first may be a husband 
who never in any of his plans considers her 
wishes or her happiness. He hates to stay 
at home, he loathes society, if she wants to 
go somewhere he at once vetoes the idea. 
He does not like to read with her or drive 
with her, or sit beside the fire and talk 
with her. If she slips her hand into his 
he refuses to hold it; he lets it slip idly down, 
out of his clasp, and pretends not to notice 
her pitiful little advances toward friendli- 
ness. He never notices her looks. If she 
wears a pretty gown he does not see it; if 
she scores a little social triumph he does 
not congratulate her. Perhaps he has not 
in ten years taken her into his arms and 
told her that he loves her. He scolds her 
unmercifully if there is a bill to pay, and 



A Chapter for Men to Read 165 

never in all their married life has he asked 
her what are her plans for the evening or 
invited her to go with him to a friend's or 
relative's house. 

I hope I am not describing many in- 
stances of married life in this particular one, 
but this situation has existed in reasonably 
good society. If the woman has a think- 
ing mind she sometimes, sooner or later, 
asks herself if she is called on to make this 
do for her share of conjugal happiness. 
Generally she has to make it do. 

Women, taken on an average, are not 
brilliant and attractive enough to command 
a hazard of new fortunes in the matrimonial 
market. Very rarely, indeed, does a woman 
who has been unhappily married ten or 
fifteen years have enough attraction left to 
arrest the attention of a marrying man. 
But this is beside the point; we are talking 
of good women, not of cold-blooded creatures 
who regard divorce as a possibility of life. 

Yes, she has to make it do> but she must 
look out for compensations. If she has been 
an obedient child of God He has already sent 
her the greatest compensation in the shape 



164 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

of children to love and work for, and a home 
— a home with a piteous lack of complete- 
ness to be sure, but still a home to feed and 
fill part of her yearning woman's heart. 
It is so good that we like to cook and clean 
and keep the linen neat and perk up the 
window curtains and polish the floor and 
*'hang loved pictures on the wall" and see 
the faces of our friends around the table 
and in the comforting glow of the firelight. 

If the wife of a careless, undutiful hus- 
band be a woman of beauty and charm, 
may the Lord have mercy upon her soul! 
May her friends rally around her and her 
relations appoint themselves her bodyguard. 
Nobody knows in what hour of unspeakable 
weakness and longing the coveted tender 
word or glance of approval may come, from 
some dangerous, insidious source. Nature 
made us strong only for the natural shocks 
that flesh is heir to; she forgot to arm us 
with a special coat of mail for unseen emer- 
gencies. I am sure she neglected to arrange 
for pretty women whose husbands live to 
slight them. Now I think I hear some 
ill-favoured and, consequently, unduly vir- 



A Chapter for Men to Read 165 

tuous sister exclaim: "Didn't she give 
them common sense?" Maybe so, but 
she should have given them uncommon 
sense, insight, inspiration, heavenly purity, 
divine steadfastness of purpose — and these 
good lady, you who have never been in the 
w^ay of temptation, are qualities we do not 
inherit unalloyed from generations of a 
sin-cursed race. Very happily, however, com- 
mon sense is a shining quality of the female 
sex. If it were not, our society would be in 
a chaotic state. My experience of life has 
shown me that women have more strength 
of character than men, much more moral 
sense, much greater power to resist temp- 
tation. It is true society fairly forces 
women to be good, but aside from this there 
is in women a genuine liking for personal 
cleanliness and purity, both of body and 
soul, that lifts them to a clearer atmosphere 
than the smoke-polluted haze of man's 
environment, and shows them the end from 
the beginning as man seldom sees it. 

It is a fact, praise be to the Creator, that 
few women are qualified for immorality 
• — the vast majority of female persons are 



i66 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

plain, steadfast individuals with domestic 
and social affairs on their hands, families 
to rear and male companions to live with 
whom they think the world and all of. Do 
not disparage this state of affairs, you ad- 
vanced thinkers who are tainted with deca- 
dent philosophy. Genius consists in half 
unconsciously doing some admirable thing. 
Wherever you find the spiritual structure 
of a real home you find a work that so far 
exceeds the writing of a book or the carving 
of a statue as to make the latter seem totally 
insignificant. 

When lovely woman stoops to folly it is 
seldom brought about by any coarse-grained 
fibre of her nature, but rather by those del- 
icate flutings of the great god Pan that first 
arrested her maiden ear and brought to her 
heart the consciousness of sex. Her husband, 
grossly satisfied with what he regards as 
conjugal felicity, and hugely ignorant of the 
delicate confidence, the tender understand- 
ing, the nameless nearness of the spirit, which 
is the true intimacy of the married state, has 
left her to find compensations for these more 
than vital things. At first she is not con- 



A Chapter for Men to Read 167 

sciously in quest of them, she is only wait- 
ing for such a time as he shall return to the 
attitude in which he wooed and won her. 
The wistfulness of her waiting shines in 
her big, brooding eyes and adds a charm 
to the face where woman's beauty lingers 
like Indian summer in the fading of the 
year. The woman's personality is an ap- 
peal to every man she meets, and the "un- 
principled " person who makes love to her 
is not so much to blame. I heard a man 
say to his wife in an argument on this sub- 
ject that no man, however immoral, ever 
spoke a word of love or flattery to another 
man's wife unless she wished him to do so, 
and let him know it. I believe this. But 
why, when he was expounding, as hus- 
bands will, did he not tell her the whole 
truth, and say who is to blame in nine out 
of ten cases of this kind ? 

A blind horse can see that the blame lies 
with the pretty woman's husband. If he 
were what he should be, she would never 
be wishing for words of love and flatttery 
from another man. Understand me. Other 
men do not make love to every pretty woman 



1 68 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

who has a careless husband. But it is one 
of the dangers that may threaten the woman 
who is, with big-hearted courage of living, 
seeking to develop in herself a rounded 
character by fitting ''other interests" into 
the niche in her heart where husband's 
affections ought to be. I use the word affec- 
tion advisedly. We all know that youth's 
transcendental passion cannot last. Do we 
all know that affection is the only thing that 
will really take its place, and do we know, 
too, that affection can be cultivated and is 
more worth cultivating than any other thing 
in the world .? 

If I were a man and should discover that 
my wife was starting out to live her own 
life I should make it the business of my 
own to see that she did n't do it. I would 
be in it if I did n't lay up a cent. If you 
persistently place your affectionate devotion 
between your wife and the laudable purpose 
of living her own life, the probabilities are 
that she will not write a book or paint a 
great picture, or even cut a prominent figure 
in society, but she will be happy and your 
children will rise up and call you blessed. 



XIII 

THE HIGHER EDUCATION 

ONE time a woman came to our little 
town to talk to us about the Higher 
Education. I was very much interested 
in the subject just at the time, for my daugh- 
ter was being graduated from the High 
School, and I was actually suffering because 
we had n't money enough to send her to 
college. 

I hoped that this great woman, who was 
dean of a college and who was to address 
our class of graduates, might help me. And 
still I was tortured by the fear that it might 
make me feel worse. I remembered a thous- 
and and one nameless finenesses that the 
higher education brings to a naturally bright 
girl, and I felt it w^ould fairly madden me 
to see and hear this woman, who was the 
typification of the new womanhood, the 

perfect product of modern civilisation, know- 
169 



170 Ideas of a Plain Country ^A(^oman 

ing, as I did, that I could never give my own 
child the opportunity of acquiring such an 
air. 

The big class of graduates sat in a semi- 
circle on the stage, and I sat in the audience 
and worried because my daughter's dress 
"hiked" up a trifle in front and because 
she had only a dozen roses, while the girl 
who sat next to her and who was to go to 
a great Eastern college had three dozen, and 
by and by the great woman came out to 
the front of the stage and said: "Ladies 
and gentlemen." She did it all right, and 
smiled very sweetly, and I groaned in the 
spirit as I realised that if my daughter went 
out to teach a country school she would n't 
have an opportunity to learn to smile like 
that. 

Before the speaker had talked very long 
I began to fear that there was that quality 
of sweetness in her voice that makes you 
wonder if the person does it all the time. 
You don't know whether you hope that she 
does or that she does n't. 

But I was not going to be prejudiced against 
her because she was saying things so sweetly. 



The Higher Education 171 

I don't like sweet things very well. I like 
coarse food plainly served and big thoughts 
ruggedly expressed — but I listened with 
all my ears, because everything has a mes- 
sage for you if you listen with all your ears. 

I had gone to hear the speaker with a 
distinct longing for help. I thought maybe 
she would reach out a hand to me across 
the gulf between the highly educated and 
the instinctively educated, and give me greet- 
ing like ships that pass in the night. I 
wished for just a little note of reassurance 
that it is worth while to go on striving to 
find for one's family what is best in life, 
to have and to hold. 

You know what it means to go to hear 
a speaker, or to take up a book or an article 
in this frame of mind, and sometimes the 
longing is gratified — the speaker or writer 
actually helps you. 

Well, this woman to whom I was listening 
with all my ears began by telling us what 
a great country we have. She told us how 
many miles of railroad there are in the United 
States. She told us how high the Flatiron 
Building in New York is, and reminded 



172 Ideas of a Plain Country ^A^oman 

us of the wonders of invention and modern 
progress. She spoke of the rush and scram- 
ble for positions of honour and credit, and 
made it pretty plain that in this rush and 
scramble somebody is sure to get left, and 
that this somebody will be the person who 
lacks the higher education. She said that 
the world no longer recognises people who 
have not a college education. 

There were twenty-one young people in 
the class, and only three or four of them 
could afford to go away to school. This 
was very pleasant for the three or four who 
held up their heads proudly, and their 
parents in the audience nodded to each other 
as if to say: "We 're in it, all right." I 
thought maybe she would say something 
to the rest of them, seeing that there were 
so many, and I knew they were sitting there 
with their hearts bursting with the bitter- 
ness of being thus excluded from every- 
thing worth having; but she never said a 
single word to them. 

She did not speak a word to help the 
mother who sat composedly in the audience 
hearing her daughter's sentence read; it was 



The Higher Education 173 

exactly as if she had dismissed us with a 
shrug of the shoulder. 

One thing I have always noticed, and that 
is that when things get at their worst they 're 
pretty sure to mend. I had been feehng 
about as badly as I could when I suddenly 
felt a delightful warmth and comfort steal- 
ing about my heart. A sudden illumination 
dawned upon me, and I knew why the woman 
who had come to talk to us was giving all 
she had to the people who did n't need it. 
It was because she did n't know any better 
— because she didn't know any better! 
She was ignorant of the fact that in a com- 
munity like ours there would naturally be 
a large percentage of the young people who, 
on leaving the public schools, must consider 
their education, as far as tuition goes, com- 
plete, and that these were the children she 
should try to inspire with hope and courage, 
instead of coolly slamming the doors of life 
in their faces. 

Just at this moment I looked up and 
caught my daughter's eye — for when a 
child is dismayed it always seeks its mother's 
eye — and I smiled and nodded to her quite 



174 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

gaily, for I knew that I, alone and unas- 
sisted, could teach her, and had been teach- 
ing her. from her birth, the very things that 
this woman with the higher education did n't 
know, and that they v/ere quite as important 
as the things she did know, and maybe more 
so. One kind of ignorance is as bad as 
another. 

This lecturer was full of little mannerisms 
which many speakers affect. She had a 
way of making a huge, architectural, twen- 
tieth-century statement and then smiling 
archly at the audience and asking sweetly, 
"And why?" 

I never did like this bantering manner 
in a speaker. It used to be very popular 
in pulpit oratory. We sat up very far to 
the front at church when I was a child. It 
did seem to me that they did everything to 
me that they could when they were bringing 
me up in the nurture and admonition of 
the Lord. I hated to go to church any- 
way. For one reason, we hever had very 
much to wear that we were proud of. It 
is nice to sail up the aisle of the meeting- 
house if one has a new hat and coat and a 



The Higher Education 175 

silk petticoat that rustles faintly, but there 
is little compensation for sitting in the front 
pew if your aunt wears her old Paisley shawl 
forever, and never in the world gets a new 
bonnet, and when you are in a chronic state 
of outgrowing your Sunday frock and are 
fearfully conscious of your white woolen 
stockings. It would be much more com- 
forting to sit back and watch people come 
in and have hats and pretty collars and 
gloves to look at during the services. But, 
as I say, we sat up in front, and I used to 
find these questions which the preacher 
hurled at us very embarrassing. "Where 
will you be? Where will you be then.^" 
he used to shout, seemingly at me, after he 
had given a particularly vivid description 
of the gates of heaven being closed with 
awful finality upon all who indulged in cer- 
tain vices to which I was fatally prone. I 
used to get so nervous I wonder I did not 
blurt out some trembling answer or defence. 
Well, our speaker kept asking us, "And 
why.?" and the answer every time was: 
"The higher education." Everybody liked 
her immensely, and we all went up and she 



176 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

let us shake hands with her and look at her, 
and then we went home. 

My sister and I walked off down the village 
street after the lecture and did n't say much. 
There are few greater comforts than a good 
sister. You always feel a bit of restraint 
in your companionship with your mother, 
fearing a possible criticism, and in your 
association with your daughter you must 
always preserve some attitude of dignity; 
but you and your sister are just "pals" in 
all sorts of mischief, and this makes a special 
nearness between you. 

By and by I remarked, more in soliloquy 
than otherwise: "I understand this person 
who has just addressed us is not married?" 
Sister turned upon me, and, with the consum- 
mate art of impersonation which is her special 
gift, inquired, "And why .?" 

We fell over against the fence then, in spite 
of the fact that we had on our best gowns and 
our white gloves because we were kin to one 
of the graduates, and began laughing like the 
"fool young 'uns" that Riley tells about: 

Me an' Bud an' Minnie Belle knows a joke 'at we 
can't tell. 



The Higher Education 177 

Sister and I are just plain women, who 
have lived in a sweet, little, old village all 
our lives and have just kept house and never 
got to go to college or any place else much. 
We are sorry, though, for college does n't 
hurt some people a bit! 

Now the point I wish to make out of this, 
for the benefit of some woman who may be 
suffering, just as T was several years ago, 
over her inability to give her children what 
she considers a proper education, is that, 
while the college education for women is 
desirable — a mother cannot be too well 
educated — this woman who came to us 
fairly out of another world, and a world 
which we are accustomed to accept as a 
higher one, was lacking in something which 
is far more important than a college education. 

As an educator she did her duty, but as a 
woman with a true woman's heart she missed 
a splendid opportunity to speak a word 
of wholesome comfort and cheer to the 
young people who must at once go out into 
the world to work, equipped only with 
youth's pathetic courage. I am aware that 
hers is a very fashionable attitude — this 



178 Ideas of a Plain Country 'Woman 

little lifting of the shoulder in the direction 
of people who, smart folk think, are not 
worth while. But this is also a very ignorant 
attitude, crass and crude as any of the 
ideas of the uneducated. 

As I listened to the self-complacent bab- 
bling of our friend of the higher education 
I longed to call out to her: "Stop talking 
■ — and say something!" I wanted her to 
tell the boys and girls that life is the great 
field for education and that "we are all 
children in the kindergarten of God," and 
I hoped she would remind us that the high- 
est education is of the heart, rather than 
the mind. 

The higher education she was telling 
about is a finish, but the highest education 
is a start. This goes very far back in the 
history of the family, and we should remem- 
ber this, not so much that we may be able 
to point with pride to a good foundation 
for our own education, as that someone in 
the future may be able to trace his own 
favourably. The future is peculiarly ours. 

I have noticed how easily some families 
begin to degenerate as soon as the money 



The Higher Education 179 

for technical education fails to be forth- 
coming. They get discouraged and allow 
their children to sink into that mental 
commonness which is so deplorable. There 
is nothing to hinder people from living at the 
top of their mental development — even 
though they may be debarred from actual 
scholarship. The worst feature about lack- 
ing a college experience is that it often shuts 
the doors of what we like to call success, 
particularly against a young man. But I 
do not know whether this is real success. 
I knew a young fellow who was a brilliant 
scholar in a fine technical school. He was 
graduated with honours and at once got a 
position with a great electrical concern. I 
went to see him at the St. Louis Exposition 
one day, and found him down in a mining 
exhibit under an engine, black and dirty 
as any coal-miner. He looked worn and 
jaded, and, though I knew that here he had 
his "chance" of working up, it all seemed 
a little pitiable in the light of its actual work- 
ings. I could n't help contrasting him and 
his tense, overstrained face with certain 
happy young fellows I knew at home who 



i8o Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

had never got to go to college, but who are 
living well and healthily on half his salary, 
which, though sounding pretty big, judged 
by our unsophisticated village standards, 
was still entirely incapable of allowing him 
and his young wife, who was also a college 
graduate, to do more than browse at life 
in the big city. 

Our public schools are constantly closing 
their doors against naturally bright teachers 
and accepting in their places narrow, in- 
ferior women because they bear the hall- 
mark of college. 

This is certainly very unwise. Any place 
of education, especially in these days of per- 
functory living, is a narrowing place. Our 
modern way of living encourages sloth- 
fulness in women. The energy put forth 
in keeping up with society and church and 
club work is superficial. We rise to the 
occasion without the use of muscles and 
mind that come into play in real living. 
This is the criticism which may be made 
on places of higher education for women. 
They lack the quality of realness, and the 
higher they get the more unnatural their 



The Higher Education i8i 

atmosphere. A girl has to be grandly gifted 
with common sense to come out of one of 
them without acquiring an artificial air of 
culture, which is more tiresome than any 
one other thing on earth. 

I listened to the woman speaker that night 
with all my ears, and by so doing learned 
exactly the opposite of what she was try- 
ing to teach. We may do this with much 
in life which is popularly accepted as good. 
I learned from her that schooling is not 
always mental development, and that edu- 
cation does not always cure ignorance, and 
that a bright woman who is determined to 
develop her own resources, mental, moral 
and physical, is not in great need of the 
higher education as it is looked upon by 
women of our speaker's type. 

It is a favourite maxim of mine that the 
real joys of life are not for the few, but belong 
to the common lot. Many educated people 
miss them because they are looking too 
high. There are a lot of catch-phrases, like 
the ''higher criticism," which are puzzling 
to many people. People are easily fooled by a 
mere change of name — especially if we call the 



i82 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

thing "new" or "higher" or "real." There is 
a yearning for what is "new" and "high'* 
and "real." So few people can tell us in 
a way we can understand that new means 
old, and high means down close to the 
ground, and real means what we cannot 
see or touch. 

Do not worry if you have n't money enough 
to buy your child advantages. Look about 
and see if you have n't something much 
more worth while that you can bestow 
without money and without price. See if 
you have n't faith and courage of living, 
patience and cheerfulness in the day's work, 
appreciation of all that is really fine in life 
and Nature, a sense of blessedness in home, 
a habit of living for the best hat is in you. 
Transmit, as only a mother can, these things 
to your children, and your home will be a 
place of highest education, where all lacks 
of scholastic culture and training are more 
than atoned for, and to which in after years 
your child may point with pride as the finest 
possible Alma Mater. 



XIV 

A BIG DAY 

THE word "eventless" is often applied 
to the life of the country woman. 
This is as you look at it. I know city women 
living in "the midst of things" whose lives 
are very humdrum. Nothing is so dull as 
luxury and society, the theatre, even travel, 
soon become monotonous unless a person 
is constituted for enjoying life, and in this 
case environment has little to do with it. 
People keep busy with pleasure-seeking as 
we toilers do with work, but I doubt that 
their activity holds the abiding flavour we 
find in actual work which makes us hungry 
and tired and sleepy, and makes food and 
rest and sleep so good. 

I know a woman in whose life three crises 
fraught with intense excitement arrive regu- 
larly every day and have done so for forty 
years. These events are breakfast, dinner, 
183 



184 Ideas of a Plain Country ^Voman 

and supper, and she charges upon them just 
as valiantly to-day as she did forty years 
ago. 

At eleven o'clock on a summer morning 
she starts for the kitchen like a war-horse 
sniffing the battle from afar. She rushes, 
she bustles, she gets hot and flurried; no- 
body's life is safe who interrupts her, and 
woe be to the cat that peeps in through the 
screen-door, or the child who proposes mak- 
ing a little pie from a bit of extra dough. 

The woman has no time for such things; 
she is absorbed in the delightful exigency -of 
achieving her ideal. 

Dare we say that her life is narrow when 
her heart and hands are so full .? She is 
happy, she loves life and would hate to close 
her eyes on the faithful range and the shiny 
clean, coffee-pot as you and I would hate to 
say good-bye to music and sunshine and 
laughter and the delectable affinities with our 
fellow-men. It is mere arrogance to as- 
sume that your life is fuller than that of 
another merely because you have a different 
way of filling it. 

If this woman thinks of me at all it is 



A Big Day 185 

to regard me as a trifle unbalanced, and to 
wish, for the sake of my family, that I were 
a bit steadier. My worst enemy must ad- 
mit that when I brace up to tussle with the 
stern realities of life I can do pretty well. 
I can keep house, cook, wash, iron, 'tend 
garden and poultry, patch, darn, sew, make 
pickles, can fruit, cure meat and do dozens 
of other things. 

A long list of accomplishments I call this, 
and I am proud of having mastered them. 
I want every other woman who is mistress 
of them to realise that they are accomplish- 
ments and that there is not necessarily any- 
thing narrowing or eventless in learning 
them. But if there is one thing I am thank- 
ful for it is for not being steady. 

It is taken for granted here at home that 
we have three fair meals a day, but it is 
also understood that nobody is going to 
break her neck cooking them. 

That is n't my way. The mere accom- 
plishment of the housework would not fill 
my life. If you like other things beside 
your trade, learn your trade so well that 
you can follow it mechanically. Women 



1 86 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

often fail here for want of concentrated 
application. They think they do not like 
their work, and keep pulling away from it 
instead of learning it so well that it will 
seem easy. 

The point in housekeeping is a general 
effect of wholesomeness and comfort. Don't 
fret over detail. Don't worry if a pie siz- 
zles out or the "grain" of the bread is not 
quite so fine as it was last week — leave 
that to our friend who cares for nothing 
else. These things would be dull to you 
and to me, and we must avoid dulness. 

In childhood and girlhood I was never 
dull — I had a talent for making things 
happen — and the years in which there 
was not time for dulness began very early 
in my life. 

It is not such a dreadful state of affairs 
when a young couple who have joined hands 
to go together into Eden find themselves, 
instead, in the plain, workaday world, where 
it is toil or starve. The situation has its 
charm, and though my young face was often 
haggard and strained, my days of prema- 
ture responsibility, of deprivation and dis- 



A Big Day 187 

appointment and fulfilment and achieve- 
ment were infinitely better than dull days. 
I laugh and cry over them as I look back, 
and wonder how such a "slip of a girl," 
"light of foot and prone to laughter," ever 
got through with them. 

My brother-in-law, the judge, who, when 
court is not in session, likes to sit listening 
to the women when they are having a 
"peelin'," asks me two or three times a 
year to tell again about my "big day." 

Do my readers know what a "peelin' " is ? 
They used to be popular when home-dried 
apples were a household necessity — but 
the kind I speak of is a different thing al- 
together. I do not think a "peelin'" is 
very ill-natured when we admit that it is 
one, and when we preface our especial flay- 
ing alive with the remark, "Now, I like 
Mrs. Blank " 

Among other blessings I have a lot of 

o to 

bright kinspeople. Some people are for 
being the bright, particular star in a some- 
what nebulous firmament of admiring sis- 
ters and cousins and aunts — but I like 
the appreciation of people who are as " smart" 



1 88 Ideas of a Plain Country ^Al^oman 

as I am better than the fondness of foolish 
folk with little discrimination. 

So I am flattered when the judge asks 
me to tell once more the story of what I 
call the "big day" in the annals of my 
housekeeping. 

It was a July day, and I rose with the lark, 
remembering the big ironing I had sprinkled 
down the night before and also that there 
was bread to bake. Our ironings were 
large in those days, for the little girls must 
have clean frocks every day, and I like a 
white tablecloth above everything, and, 
besides, we had a guest staying at the house. 
I had no maid and the girls were too little 
to help much. The ironing must be fin- 
ished by noon, as I was invited to "assist" 
at a reception that afternoon, and it could 
not go over until to-morrow, because that 
was Wednesday, the day my blackberries 
were engaged for. 

A woman cannot give up a party when she 
is young, even if her legs are about to drop 
oW from "tiredness." The joy of swishing 
about in one's silk skirts, handling dainty 
cups and plates, and smiling benignly upon 



A Big Day 189 

Mrs. So~and-So, who is furious at not be- 
ing chosen to assist, is not to be foregone. 

I knew well that if I was to get to that 
beloved social function (what woman does n't 
love them ?) I must let no grass grow under 
my feet, so when the family and our guest 
came down to breakfast the bread was 
mixed and set to rise, the chickens fed, and 
the clotheshorse showed a pretty fair array 
of neatly smoothed garments. When the 
irons are hot, and the starch does n't stick, 
and one gets into the swing of it, one can 
turn off piece after piece with considerable 
celerity. 

I made a flying trip to the garden after 
the breakfast dishes were washed, and while 
the irons were "heating up" again, for veg- 
etables for dinner, and found, when I re- 
turned, that "the man," having mistaken 
the date, had brought my eight gallons of 
blackberries. I was an optimistic little soul, 
so I kept the berries, thinking to finish the 
ironing and bread-baking and dinner-cook- 
ing in intervals of canning and pouring jelly 
into glasses. 

Our guest was a privileged house-friend 



igo Ideas of a Plain Country ^A^oman 

who stayed with us several weeks out of each 
year and who Hked nothing better than to 
loaf around the kitchen when I was at work. 
I like men loafing around the kitchen well 
enough, not being like some women who 
simply *'fly to pieces" if the "men-folks" 
come around the cook-stove; but there are 
certain times when the masculine element 
is not especially desirable. 

However, our friend was in a loquacious 
mood that day — he usually was, being a 
scholar of the old time when learning did not 
grow on trees — so he insisted on sitting in 
the kitchen expounding the Darwinian theory 
and spouting long passages of the Iliad, 
sometimes in the English of Pope, again 
in the original — which was "all Greek" 
to me. I liked the odes of Horace better, 
as I could understand some Latin words. 
He had only got fairly started on 

Integer vitae sccleris que purus 

Non eget Mauris jaculis neque arcu 

when a fearful hubbub arose outside, and 
eight or ten youngsters, all talking at once 
appeared, bearing my youngest on an im- 
promptu litter known as a hand saddle. Her 



A Big Day 19 1 

face was covered with blood, and the only 
assurance I had that she was not fatally 
injured lay in the shrieks she was emitting. 

It was, after all, only a cut over the eye 
administered by a croquet-mallet in the 
hands of a visiting infant. We feared it 
might leave a scar, but it did n't. Our guest 
left off the classics and helped me dress the 
wound, and I had just finished cuddling 
the victim of this casualty and convinced 
her that she had a remnant of life left, when 
the blackberries boiled over on the irons 
and I smelt the bread scorching in the oven. 
It is a miracle I did not scald my hands 
moving the kettle. 

Someway we had dinner, but I began to 
see that there is a Hmit to the housekeeper's 
powers, be she never so clever, so I ex- 
plained to my "men-folks" as I covered up 
the table leaving dishes and all just as they 
were (I washed up the pots and pans as I 
went, getting dinner), that they must get 
supper at a restaurant downtown, as I never 
could get home from that party with strength 
enough to cook it. 

I sent the children to their grandmother 



192 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

(happy children, none ever had a lovelier 
grandmother!) and hustled into my Sunday 
gown. There is only one kind of woman 
who can "hustle into her Sunday gown" 
on a hot day and feel all right, and that is a 
woman with curly hair, which needs no elab- 
orate dressing, but just a little twist. For- 
tunately, I have a woolly head, and though 
my hair is in no sense a "crowning glory," 
it is a comfort when one is in a hurry — 
two hairpins will hold it up! 

The reception was at a beautiful country 
home not far from town. I was happy in 
the excitement of meeting the large com- 
pany. There is, in every woman's souh 
a longing for a glimpse of the thing we call 
society. And do not, country sisters, let 
anyone make you believe that there is such 
a vast difference between our country 
parties and the "swell" affairs of the city. 
If we are a bit boisterous and lacking in 
decorum they have deficiencies quite as 
lamentable. They are affected and cold, and 
often eat things we would n't feed to the 
chickens. 

I forgot all about the work of the morning, 



A Big Day 193 

and my dear little girl with the "shiner" 
her playmate had given her, and the ghastly 
dinner-table covered up awaiting my return. 
Sister and I drove happily homeward "talk- 
ing it over," which is always the best part 
of any entertainment, but I was brought 
abruptly back from decorations and cos- 
tumes to plain business when I saw my 
husband and our guest placidly seated on 
our front porch. They had forgotten my 
instructions about supper and were waiting 
for me to come and cook it for them. 

I pass over supper and the washing of the 
accumulated dishes, but just as I was fin- 
ishing them a gay party of town friends 
arrived to spend the evening. 

They were scarcely seated when a quiet 
little neighbour from across the fields, not 
knowing I had company, appeared with 
her three babies, one an infant in arms and 
two adorable toddlers both under five. To 
be sure, these babies should have been in 
bed, for it was late twilight, but my heart 
goes out to the young mother who, when 
the busy day is done, feels the need of a 
little visiting. 



194 Ideas of a Plain Country ^Voman 

It was not the first situation I had faced 
that day, so I put my gay friends to play- 
ing an absorbing game while I sat on the 
porch and entertained the little mother, 
talking, and nursing the two elder babies. 

When the mother rose to go, the second 
baby, being tired and sleepy, refused to be 
put down, crying dismally, and declaring 
in inarticulate speech that she could n't 
walk. 

My mother had by this time arrived, bring- 
ing home my own children, so I deputised 
her as temporary hostess while, groaning 
inwardly, I shouldered the tired, sleepy, 
little youngster and trudged home with my 
friend. 

When I returned my guests were still 
absorbed in their game, so I slipped up- 
stairs to hear the children say their prayers, 
and when I came down mother met me 
with an anxious face. She had been to 
the kitchen and seen the clotheshorse, the 
baking of bread, the cans of berries and the 
twenty or so glasses of jelly. "My dear," 
she said with gentle seriousness, "I think 
you have had a big day." I sat down on 



A Big Day 195 

the lower step and burst out laughing. 
And, if you will believe me, I was n't a par- 
ticle tired or a mite sleepy! 

Yes, it was a "big day," but it certainly 
was n't a dull one — and from dull days, 
with the remembering sunshine marking the 
slow-going hours that lead to nothing, may 
all young women be delivered! 

Many people having home and loved 
ones close around them let dulness creep 
in, when by just a little effort at conge- 
niality, a little loosening of the tension of 
duty, a little yielding to a sense of humour, 
all might be sweet and good. 

I hope we may be able to convince mis- 
taken people that the life of the woman who 
does her own work is not necessarily dull. 
Dull people are born, not made, and who 
was it who said: "People who don't like 
the country because there is so little going 
on are those in whose heads there is less 
going on than even in the country" ? There 
is always something going on. Life is going 
on. The universe is going on. They are 
dull people who require constant distraction 
and the over-entertainment which has be- 



196 Ideas of a Plain Country ^Voman 

come a habit with 'society" people is indeed 
a "dreary agitation of the dust." 

The life of the country woman is full of 
days such as I have described. Let her 
be thankful for them and keep her interest 
in them just as they are, and she will be to 
the end immune from the evil days that have 
no pleasure in them. 



XV 

THE GOOD AND EVIL OF BOOKS AS THEY 
PERTAIN TO women's LIVES 

MY "BIG days" of housework were 
generally succeeded by big days of 
equally strenuous mental activity. I would 
read and read and read till my eyes were blur- 
red and things about me seemed unreal — 
intangible. I read everything and some of 
the books came pretty nearly ruining me 
before I came out in the far side of their pol- 
lution and shook myself free in the clear 
atmosphere of plain common sense and 
inspired reason. There are so many bad 
books — useless, inconsequent books — it is 
difficult to separate the wheat from the tares. 
I can remember when a novel was never 
spoken of without a little lowering of the 
voice, and I have watched with much interest 
the change of heart that has taken place re- 
garding fiction. 

197 



198 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

Ours was a reading family, a rather un- 
usual thing in a little Indiana village, and 
thrifty neighbours criticised us for it. We 
read Dickens and Thackeray at an early day 
and were devoted to the old-fashioned poets. 
Mother read to us children "The Tales of the 
Alhambra" and "The Arabian Nights," 
but I very early discovered that there was 
an element in fiction that must be kept from 
the young. Why did mother lock "Jane 
Eyre" in the top bureau-drawer.? There 
was a mystery about it, and something told 
me it was a nice mystery. It was like the 
things on the top shelf of the three-cornered 
cupboard in the dining-room — one could 
never reach up there, though little sister 
steadied the high-backed chair till she was 
purple in the face while I climbed up at the 
risk of life and limb. 

I was not much more than six when I 
was discovered reading "The Hidden Hand" 
in the old "New York Ledger." Uncle had, 
among other vices which sorely tried his re- 
spectable Presbyterian spouse, a liking for 
Saturday evening story papers. After it 
was known that I was reading them they 



The Good and Evil of Books 199 

were barred from the house. I was so dis- 
consolate over this decree that uncle, who 
was fatally "good-hearted," took to hiding 
the papers in a cunning little hole in the 
haymow where I could find them and read 
the beloved stories when mother thought I 
was at play. 

How well I remember those delightful 
hours, nestled in the warm, soft hay! Verily, 
I "ate and drank the precious words"! 

I was well along in "The Haunted Hus- 
band, or Lady Chetwynd's Spectre," when 
I was detected. But mother was wise. 
She did not take the story away from me, 
but insisted I finish it in the house where I 
read other stories. 

As I remember them, these stories were 
not of unsound moral sentiment, for, though 
fiction was regarded with disapproval, even 
the cheapest of it was of a higher moral tone 
than that of much which now appears in 
high-class periodicals which print stories 
of illicit love-aflTairs, of chance meetings 
between young people in the streets, of clever 
burglarising, suggesting to young readers 
how it may be done. Atheistic doctrine is 



200 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

freely aired in popular stories, and the gen- 
eral tone of our latest literature ends on the 
keynote of "what 's the use of being good ?" 

The married flirt — whose great pro- 
totype was Becky Sharp — has been ideal- 
ised until a very attractive model has been 
set up for our childless young married women. 
Our modern writers have not been sincere 
nor clever enough to disclose to us as Thack- 
eray did the lovelessness and actual heart- 
loneliness which is the inevitable heritage 
of such a woman, but have shown her to us 
with diabolical art as a piquant creature 
fairly justified in her moral lightness. 

The girl whose heart is her guide is an- 
other popular heroine. I knew a little girl 
who, under the influence of that consummate 
little hypocrite, Elsie Dinsmore, was always 
on the lookout for some occasion that would 
justify her in setting up her "conscience" 
against something the family wished to do. 
She generally managed to cast a gloom over 
the picnic, break up the Virginia reel, or spoil 
whatever innocent sport was going on, and 
she actually acquired a morbid disposition 
by seeking for "conscience tests" such as 



The Good and Evil of Books 201 

fill up the affected and unhealthy pages 
of the "Elsie books" which so many reli- 
gious people admire. 

The majority of our modern novels are 
injurious to the young, but I think the people 
who are in most danger from reading pois- 
onous fiction are young married women, 
whose minds are beginning really to develop. 

Among other things which have come to 
woman with the "awakening" of the woman 
movement is a determination to be coura- 
geous about truth. Much of the over-reading 
from which a certain class is suffering comes 
from this morbid thirst for truth and knowl- 
edge, and many women devour light litera- 
ture under the impression that they are 
arriving at a sort of sophistication. 

When it comes to truth there are just a few 
things that we know for certain, and we 
generally learn them from the lips of a wise 
mother or grandmother. The only fiction 
which is worth reading is such as accepts as 
incontrovertible the simple, great truths of 
life and goes ahead and tells us a good sound 
story. 

The books which deal in little hair-split- 



202 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

tings of right and wrong, discuss platonic 
love, expose the trials and question the duties 
of the married state, and dwell upon mor- 
bid subjects of "sex interest," are either 
chosen with deliberate purpose by people 
who need material and lack inspiration, or 
else they emanate from the undisciplined 
minds of women who have some facility 
with the pen, but who lack real genius and 
have little proper feeling for art. The pub- 
lishers are to blame that such productions 
ever see the light of day, but women who 
read them and discuss them are quite as 
culpable. 

Women read these books in ignorance of 
the great laws of the body and its relation 
to the divine. They are strangely blinded 
to facts when it comes to literature and art. 
Take, for instance, a book like "The Mas- 
querader," which sold so famously, though 
there was not an original note in it from 
cover to cover. Do the young women who 
so eagerly devoured it realise that its only 
charm, aside from being in a sense well 
written, was the propinquity of a man and 
a woman who were not husband and wife .'' 



The Good and Evil of Books 203 

Do they see the indelicacy of the whole sit- 
uation, and know that all these books are 
just unholy tamperings with the institution 
of marriage and the family ? 

At a certain age we are prone to believe 
that there is a new wisdom for us. The 
world suddenly stands tiptoe to explain 
something it has withheld from others. We 
are about to know why things are thus. 
Many of our modern novels start out with 
some hint of explaining this thing to us. 
We read in a sort of excitement, only to 
find at the end that the writer has shown 
us the world in a horrible mess and given us 
no remedy for it. Many young women 
who have not been carefully taught do get 
a sort of understanding of human nature 
and its weaknesses from fiction of this sort, 
but they are very unfortunate in doing so, 
and we pity them as we pity children who 
first learn of the mystery of life and birth 
from the lips of vulgar playmates rather 
than at the knees of a wise, kind mother. 

Woman, who holds the highest, most 
responsible office in the world, can never 
afford to blink her eyes at truth. Let her 



204 Ideas of a Plain Country "Woman 

be wise. Let her be equipped with the 
most consummate understanding of things 
as they are. Let her know the truth about 
love and understand that there is no pla- 
tonic relation between a virile man and a 
good-looking woman. Let her know how 
easily the finer chords of sex are touched 
in the nobler animal by a sense of art. Let 
her know that such knowledge is a safeguard 
for warm friendship between man and 
woman, and that all discussion of such sub- 
jects in novels is a transgression of the 
moral law. Let her know that it is through 
ignorance of these great truths which are 
withheld from women by unwise teachers 
who like to place sentiment ahead of plain 
judgment, that lovely woman often "stoops 
to folly," and that it is in ignorance that she 
often reads what appeals to her baser nature, 
failing to perceive that the "erotic" novel 
lays bare our inner sanctuary with a dese- 
cration only less shameless than the "reli- 
gious" novel which trades upon our holiest 
emotions and places our typified Redeemer 
on the list of characters in fiction. 

The kind of knowledge it pays woman 



The Good and Evil of Books 205 

to have is such quiet knowledge, and it is 
never best to prate about it. I want her 
to get back from her position of daring and 
reaching out for experiences to the post at 
the home fireside where she is so badly 
needed. The modern novel — or perhaps 
any novel — ■ goes far to carry out the idea 
that the domestic woman is a fool. 

Even those which try to set up a contrast 
between the good and the bad woman usu- 
ally succeed in making the good heroine 
"faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly 
null," and ascribing all the vivacity and charm 
to the most immoral woman in the book. 
Perhaps this is because it is seldom, given 
to us to describe the dearest and best. If 
anyone asked you to give a proper appre- 
ciation of your mother would you not soon 
become inarticulate and end by saying: 
"Oh, she was just mother!"? 

I heard a fashionable woman at a recep- 
tion remark in answer to the question as to 
why Mrs. Humphry Ward persists in giving 
us immoral women as heroines in her books: 
"She must, if she wants her books to sell. 
Good women are seldom interesting." This 



2o6 Ideas of a Plain Country ^A^onlan 

was a reflection of popular sentiment as im- 
bibed from the modern novel. It was the 
expression of the "reading pubHc" in its 
huge lack of perception, jaded as it is with 
over-entertainment and blase with cheap 
sentiment. 

In answer to this crass remark another 
woman said, sighing a little: "Well, maybe 
they are not, but I would rather be good 
than interesting!" I wanted to shake her 
for the foolish admission that she felt she 
must accept as good literature what came 
to her from a famous writer, even though 
her own judgment with divine insistence 
kept suggesting its falseness and impropriety. 
It is exactly in this way, by not thinking 
for ourselves, that women so often fail to dis- 
criminate between what is really strong 
and big in literature and what is merely 
spurious and vulgar. 

When I heard the woman say that good 
women are seldom interesting I hastily sum- 
moned to my memory the three brightest, 
most companionable and certainly most beau- 
tiful women I have ever known, and found 
that they were also the best women I have 



The Good and Evil of Books 207 

ever known. They had woman's exquisite 
charm, her constancy, her patience, com- 
bined with man's honour, his humour 
and his courage. I was never dull in their 
society, though none of their lives would 
have made a popular novel. Cleverly set 
down, however, they might have turned out 
one of those rare books like "Cranford," 
"Rebecca," or "Elizabeth and Her German 
Garden." 

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder; so 
the charm of the book is in the mind of the 
reader — it is for you to say which shall 
seem most "interesting" to you: a story 
like those mentioned above, or a book brist- 
ling with immoralities told in language sug- 
gestive enough to rouse the flagging sense 
of interest in minds steeped and dulled in 
sensational details of rotten society. 

Do not be confused if you are not "up" 
on all the recent books, or ashamed if some- 
body asks you if you have read Mrs. So-and- 
So's latest and you have never heard of it. 
Much reading and preparing of club papers 
are done by women who would far better 
be joining in children's games or cooking 



2o8 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

something really good and "homey" for 
them to eat. "Like what you like" is one 
of my favourite mottoes, and I believe it as 
applied to reading, eating, and living. 

One day 1 missed my mother from the 
kitchen and sitting-room, and after searching 
for her through the garden and henhouse 
I finally found her upstairs lying in the mid- 
dle of the bed, a book in one hand and a big, 
ripe apple in the other. 

"Go Vay," she commanded, waving the 
apple at me, "and don't bother me — I'm 
having a good time! I am reading 'Wild 
Bill, or the Heroes of the Plains'!" 

I retired, choking with laughter — mother 
was the brightest woman I ever knew and 
her taste in literature was absolutely unerring. 

It was my mother who, with caustic kind- 
ness showed me the plain, unvarnished 
facts of life, and then with divine art taught 
me to clothe them with the ideal, to find 
beauty for ashes, joy for renunciation. Her 
mind was its own tribunal, and she saw the 
foolishness of all attempts to change the 
manifest destiny of woman or uproot the 
foundations of morality for any new doctrine 



The Good and Evil of Books 209 

making divorce respectable or free love a 
thing to be condoned. 

So she swept aside, as all bright and good 
women should, the inconsequent, the delete- 
rious and the unpleasant in literature, choos- 
ing restful tales of quiet English farm-life, 
strong stories of travel and adventure, true- 
hearted love stories of the nobler type, and 
now and again a yarn like "Wild Bill" for 
some mood of humorous relaxation. 

Out here in the country among farmers' 
wives and village women there is never 
unlimited time for reading — and that is 
a good thing! It is much better to be busy 
than intellectual. Intellect among women 
has come to be a drug on the market, but 
the domestic virtues remain above par. 

The book has its place on mother's work- 
table and she who neglects it is reprehen- 
sible, but when we read let us choose some- 
thing pleasant and uplifting, and eschew the 
morbid and vulgar in our reading as in our 
conversation. 



XVI 

THE SIN OF TRYING TO BE TOO GOOD 

AVERY dear friend of mine said to me 
the other day with a cadence of gentle 
melancholy in her tone. " I have very few 
pleasures in this world." I glanced quickly 
up at her to see if she was consciously "put- 
ting on" or if she really thought that what 
she said was true. The tie between us is 
of the sort that is thicker than water and 
I would n't hesitate a moment to invite her 
to come off her perch, or even to assist her 
to descend by forcible means, if I thought it 
would do any good. My sisters and I were 
brought up in a holy horror of "putting on," 
and were always on the lookout for the slight- 
est hint of affectation in voice or manner. Our 
wits were sharpened to the detection of the 
faintest tinge of sentimentalism — the merest 
swaying of the form in walking — the most 
infinitesimal wag of head — the slightest 



The Sin of Trying to be Too Good 21 1 

suggestion of taking ourselves seriously or 
making the most of a situation. 

We dreaded the laughter and sarcasm 
that were the sure retribution of posing 
— so we held to plain facts until it really 
amounted to a fault. Plain dealing can be 
overdone, and truth itself employed unnec- 
essarily. However, I saw that the woman 
believed what she said — but I laughed 
anyway — openly and derisively. We were 
on the way home from a session of bridge 
whist and were going for a drive the next . 
afternoon; the next day after that was the 
euchre club; some friends had telephoned 
that they were coming in to spend the evening: 
the poor soul who had no pleasures was 
hastening home to strike a light to the wood 
fire in her big, pleasant hall, to draw a 
pitcher of cider and put it in the refrigerator 
for her guests. Her girl was getting supper; 
nobody was sick; the winter coal laid in; her 
cellar full to overflowing with good things 
for the coming winter. And so I laughed 
at her because she had so few pleasures in 
this world. 

I never did admire the attitude of the 



212 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

cross-bearing child, or the idea of being a 
pilgrim and a stranger in this vale of tears. 
As for me I am so native to my element that 
everything appeals to me with a sort of 
pleasure. As we walked along the street 
that afternoon a thousand little conscious- 
nesses thrilled me with a sense of pleasure. 
The clear sunset, the fresh September breeze, 
with just the hint of wood smoke on its breath, 
the rustle of the leaves on the maple trees 
that make our town a sylvan home, with all 
the suggestions the word implies — - the long 
vista of the street under the arching branches, 
the flight of blackbirds coming home to roost, 
the familiar houses wherein dwell the neigh- 
bours (and every one around as dear as a 
relation!) the motion of walking, the function 
of breathing — the myriads of memories 
and realisations, reminiscent and anticipa- 
tory, folded in the convolutions of the brain 
and faintly expressing themselves in the 
sensations of the hour. 

I wondered how the woman had come to 
let these things lose their efi^ect upon her 
— and then it suddenly came to me that 
she had done so by trying to be good! How 



The Sin of Trying to be Too Good 213 

many people have done the same thing, let 
the long list of martyrs, religious fanatics, 
inmates of monasteries, convents and luna- 
tic asylums reply! I am of the earth, 
earthy, and I am glad of it. This world is 
my home while I stay in it, and, to tell the 
truth, I do not care if that is forever and 
ever. Let me change to a beech tree or a 
quaking aspen, or a red bird or a fish, so 
I may keep this joy when the wind blows 
and the rain falls and the sun shines on the 
riffles of the creek, or sinks in a sea of gold 
behind the scant fringe of our fast-thinning 
Indiana woods. 

As a race we are given to hypochondria. 
It was a part of the religion of our ances- 
tors. We were to taboo pleasure — to take 
up our cross — in short, to make ourselves 
a terror to the young and a burden to our- 
selves in the mistaken idea that we were 
gaining something by it. Women are par- 
ticularly given to this form of martyrdom. 
They accept the cares of life as trials, when 
they might just as well make joys of them, 
and they show a servile respect to grief that 
must be trying to Him who sends sorrows 



214 Ideas of a Plain Country M/oman 

as blessings to such as will have them so. 
There is a vast difference in the way grief 
comes to us — but it is a belief of mine that 
the more strongly we allow our element to 
claim us, the closer we live to the Hfe of the 
body, the easier it is to bear the natural 
griefs that flesh is heir to. For this reason 
it is all important to keep to the simple 
joys of living and loving — let the little 
daily cares — the seemingly inconsequent 
things, be dear to you, and let life itself be 
dear to you — as dear as it will — never 
spurn its pleasures, and above all, know 
when you have them. Realise your bless- 
ings before it is too late — and never say 
you have few pleasures so long as a year of 
youth is left and you love anybody in the 
world or anybody in the world loves you. 
Youth means much besides mere youngness 
— it is a thing we may keep or lose. 

I am an unorthodox soul who does n't 
go to church, an unconventional person who 
is always transgressing social rules and cus- 
toms, a lax housekeeper, working by fits 
and starts, a somewhat indiscreet talker, 
given to plain speech and open confession. 



The Sin of Trying to be Too Good 215 

The truth is, however, I am not needed at 
church. If I were, I should go. I never 
went to a revival meeting in my life, but what 
a paralysis fell upon the spirit of the occa- 
sion. Not a conversion, not a testimony, 
not a hand-shaking, or a walk-around takes 
place while I am inside the doors. There 
is always a painful and perspiring effort on 
the part of the evangelist. Embarrassing 
silences come in which one can hear a pin 
drop. Nobody rises for prayer, not a sin- 
ner goes to the mourner's bench, the meeting 
stands at a deadlock — though the night 
before there was a great awakening. I am 
always seized with the idea that it is up to 
me to do something, but I don't quite know 
what it is. It would be insincere for me to 
rise for prayer; my voice is too much cracked 
by long disuse to raise a hymn on a sudden 
and risk carrying it till the others recover 
from their surprise and join in one by one. 
I feel a sympathy for the hero of the old 
story about the stranger who happened in 
when the preacher was discoursing on the 
sheep and the goats. "And who will be 
the goats ?" he demanded in old-style pulpit 



2i6 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

oratory — "and who will be the goats?" 
The silence after the reiteration of this ques- 
tion was so prolonged and impressive that 
the stranger, being of an obliging disposition, 
rose and remarked: "Well, mister, rather 
than have the performance stop, I '11 be a 
goat." I always feel an intense willingness 
to be a goat or anything else that will help 
matters along, but I have n't the talent for 
it some way, and once out in the open air 
with my limbs freed from the terrifying 
limitations of the pew in which there is no 
opportunity for action except to rise while 
singing the last verse or when the preacher 
asks all who want to go to heaven to stand 
up, I decide for the hundredth time, that 
browsing out along the highways and hedges 
is my best chance. 

Not that I do not respect church-going 
people or the sentiment that takes them 
there. I was never for carrying coals to 
Newcastle — there are so many good women 
who go to church — one less is scarcely 
noticed. If I were a man, now, and could 
make a spot of tweed or cheviot among the 
silks and voiles, I think I should go, but 



The Sin of Trying to be Too Good 217 

then there are so many fine things I would 
do if I were a man, it really seems a pity 
I was n't one. 

In regard to being good, what a joke it will 
be on me if at the end I find my philosophy 
wrong, and that I made a mistake in merely 
being thankful and appreciative, and in 
accepting the little gratuities of life as bless- 
ings and being glad over them! What if 
I have to go back and learn it all over again 
and know that my delight in every wayside 
weed and flower was a pagan joy — my 
rapture in the sunshine only a passion which 
we leave behind — my being happy, like 
the apples, when the south wind blows, 
merely a sensuous response to the call — 
what call? How faint and far — how rem- 
iniscent and prophetic — ah, we cannot know 
for certain which part of us is nearest God 
or when we are spurning the divine! 

At any rate, I am convinced that there 
is no virtue in having few pleasures. Every- 
thing is a pleasure that belongs properly 
to our element. We should be normal souls, 
not struggling against our destiny, and as 
such the functions of life are naturally pleas- 



2i8 Ideas of a Plain Country \A^oman 

urable and we should not despise them. 
I was getting dinner the other day, when 
it suddenly struck me what a jolly thing 
it was to be doing. I was hungry, for one 
thing, and that made it better. And it 
was cool enough to make the kitchen fire 
not ungrateful. I had rushed down at a 
quarter past eleven to scare up something 
for dinner. I made a little peach cobbler, 
fried a skilletful of tomatoes, cooked mashed 
potatoes, fried ham with cream gravy, made 
soda biscuits, and put a dish of crisp white 
celery and a shaky mould of my new crab- 
apple jelly on the table. 

I have a mania for waiting till the last 
minute and then racing like mad to get the 
meal on the table. This is contrary to all 
authorities on housekeeping — and maybe 
that is why I like to do it. I never could 
plan ahead for days in advance. I am sure 
I should n't enjoy things to eat if they were 
not prepared on the impulse of the moment, 
but as I say, it suddenly occurred to me what 
a fine state of aflPairs it was to be hungry 
and have something to cook and some loved 
ones to share the meal with one! There 



The Sin of Trying to be Too Good 219 

was pleasure in every motion of flying around 
the kitchen, satisfaction in being able in a 
few minutes to evolve a good meal from the 
raw material, delight in the warmth and 
fragrance of the room, with the clear sunlight 
and crisp autumnal air outside. Would any 
woman who can do this dare to say she has 
few pleasures ? 

But aside from these homely delights 
— that we should all allow to be as dear to 
us as they wish to be — there are so many 
others. I am just woman enough to like 
to go to a tea or reception, or large evening 
company or card party, or picnic, or anything 
else that comes along. Here in a very 
"poky" little village, far from great cities 
and social centres, my friends and I have 
been free to have fun in our own way, and 
we have had it. The gypsy picnics we 
used to have remain bright spots in our 
memories. I was detailed, with two digni- 
fied gentlemen, to fry the potatoes. Later, 
my sister-in-law and I quarrelled over frying 
the eggs, and finally we all sat down to a 
feast for the gods — seasoned by hunger 
and the novelty of the occasion. Often, 



220 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

four good cronies took long afternoon drives 
and spread our little supper table on the 
shorn grass of the meadows, where the long 
shadows of little thickets on the west of 
us stretched canopies of shade for us. I 
took my samovar and made coffee, and 
between you and me, the poor lady who has 
not many pleasures was always one of our 
number. 

We have an old horse who paces in harness, 
and is so lazy we can scarcely beat him out 
of a walk, but when one puts the saddle on 
him quite early on an autumn morning and 
strikes out the big road, he really has some 
pretty fair gaits. He can "rack" a little 
and has a nice little lope — if one were not 
a bit afraid he might stumble — but why 
cross the bridge, or go over the horse's head 
before the time comes ^ All the blisses of a 
lifetime are crowded into an autumn morn- 
ing ride. 

I believe in many pleasures as a safeguard 
to morality. I doubt the virtue of allowing 
seeming duty to intervene between one and 
a personal pleasure. Much preaching has 
instilled into our minds the idea that it is 



The Sin of Trying to be Too Good 221 

our duty to make other people happy. I 
doubt that it is as much our duty as to make 
ourselves happy. Happiness is infectious, 
and happy people spread the contagion. 
Some of the most disagreeable people I know 
are devoted to the idea of making others 
happy. To this end they are always hauling 
out some impossible person and making 
him wretched by trying to mix him up with 
people who are not congenial. They are 
always frowning upon other people's pleas- 
ures, always reminding them of neglected 
duty. They are opposed to gossip, and look 
askance at gaiety, and their patronage is 
fatal to the young, for it places any person 
whom they seek out in the light of a bene- 
ficiary. I firmly believe if they put in the 
time having high jinks just for their own 
amusement, they would do more good in 
the vv^orld. For the gay and bright need 
not be unkind, nor can the happy be selfish 
or the selfish happy. It is useless to under- 
take to make people happy by being per- 
sistently kind to them. If they are bright they 
will be happy in their own way; if they are dull 
you cannot improve them. They will only 



222 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

demand more than you have to give and turn 
sulky if you do not instantly produce it. 

No woman who lives in a sweet home in 
a shady country town with pleasant friends 
around her, with books to read and horses 
to drive and good things to eat, and work to 
do, has a right to say she has few pleasures. 
We all have our griefs, our heartaches, our 
woes, but we should not live in them. One 
day at a time is the way to live. (Oh, irre- 
vocable days if we could have you back 
again!) As for me the fast fleeting days 
hold so many pleasures I scarcely know which 
to seize as it hurries along! Eheu fugaces! 

— and the day is done! I am glad, however, 
I went with my friend to drive yesterday 
and that we stole the peaches that hung so 
temptingly over the roadway. To be sure, 
they were clings and a trifle sour, and I got 
peach fuzz down my neck, but how we laughed 
when I rolled down the grassy bank with 
the bough that had broken in my hands, 
and how warm the sunlight was, and how 
blue the hills in the distance looked! To- 
morrow may hold another laugh like that 

— who knows .? 



XVII 

REFLECTIONS OF A GRANDMOTHER 

Oh, child world: After this world — just as when 

I found you first sufficed 
My soulmost need — if I found you again, 

With all my childish dreams so realised, 

I should not be surprised. 

I AM so glad of the advent of a little 
child into our somewhat grown up 
family circle. I say somewhat grown up, 
because we are none of us very staid and 
sober, though some of us have reached the 
half century mark. At any rate it is always 
a good thing for people to have a little child 
to lead them into the kingdom of Heaven 
— which just means love if people only 
knew it. Well, if a little child cannot lead 
us into this blessed land nothing can; we 
are absolutely hopeless and hardened if we can 
resist following little feet and tiny clinging 

hands into the realm that childhood glorifies. 

223 



224 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

One of the resplendent gifts of childhood 
is a wilHngness to share its joy with the 
whole world. Exclusiveness, that diaboli- 
cal quality which so many grown people 
cultivate, is not inherent in the human race. 
A child is born free and equal as far as he 
knows. He is ready to join hands with any- 
thing that can run, or laugh, or sing, or dance, 
or play, white or black, straight or crooked, 
four-footed or biped, it is all one to him, just 
so the creature is alive and gifted with motion. 

It is astonishing how very early a child 
will take notice of little children. I have 
begun to tell the most extravagant tales about 
my grandson. Already I detect quiet glances 
passing between the other members of the 
family when I launch out in praises of the 
infant phenomenon. I declare I do not 
exaggerate, but they all believe that I do, 
so I might as well "make it seven" while 
I am about it. At any rate, allowing much 
for my imagination, which is vivid at all 
times, I insist that the child did notice little 
children and turn his head to gaze upon 
them with a strange intentness when he 
was — well, I really am afraid to say how old. 



Reflections of a Grandmother 



225 



Speaking of this quality of imagination. 
All my life I have been accused of imag- 
ining things, but have I really done so ? Is 
there not, perhaps, a world, visible to me, 
but hidden from many ? Kipling speaks 
of the "egg of colour," which only a few 
can see. I hope he knows what he means 
by "egg" — and doubtless he does — but, 
though I do not, I am sure I see colours that 
the majority of people do not see. There 
are shades of pink and mauve on fallow 
fields and prismatic effects in winter land- 
scapes which I am sure escape the "casual 
eye." For the casual eye is so willing for 
things to escape it — just as the casual ear 
is. "Eyes have they, but they do not see, 
and ears, but they hear not." This capacity 
for not hearing and seeing is the special 
gift of the young when they first begin to 
imagine themselves grown up, and much 
thought of by them at a certain age. Their 
eyes are fixed upon some glittering future 
which they are to arrive at — some way — 
meanwhile, nothing "around here" is worth 
looking at. I had known grown folk who 
held themselves in this attitude. 



226 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

We never know how early a child begins 
to think, and I am persuaded there is a vast 
difference in children in this regard, I often 
hear people say: "Oh, I was only four or 
five years old when that happened. I can't 
remember about it!" Dear me! how much 
of life I had lived when I was four or five 
years old. All the acquaintance I was ever 
to have with my own father was made before 
I was five. The strongest, plainest recol- 
lection I carry of my dear, quaint, strong- 
minded aunt, who meant so much to my child- 
hood, was painted upon my memory wheii 
I was four. The indelible impression of a 
regime long passed over and mostly, now, 
forgotten, was made before I was four. 
I knew the irrevocableness of death and the 
thrilling face of tragedy, the gaunt visage 
of worry and had sensed some of the mys- 
tery of life and birth before I was five. I 
knew that Santa Claus did not come down 
the chimney, and that the stork did not 
bring little brother, and that everybody 
one meets is not necessarily a friend — 
and, oh — such lots of things before I 
was five. Besides, I could read, and I had 



Reflections of a Grandmother 227 

fallen in love with my cousin, who was a 
bachelor of thirty-five. Really, when I 
think of it I was a woman with a history 
at five. So, it is no wonder I attribute 
strange ideas and early appreciation to the 
very young. 

But when we are very young we have a 
strange belief in the kindly purpose of life, 
which no amount of trouble can destroy, and 
even privation and suffering cannot quite ex- 
tinguish. We have a talent for happiness, and 
it is this that makes us of such inestimable 
value to our elders. We communicate to 
them, in spite of themselves, some of the 
joy of living. I have known people who 
sternly forbade their children to bring them 
this happy sense of childhood. Some people 
are hopelessly grown up — especially some 
women. A man is nearly always ready to 
allow a child to lead him back to "toyland, 
toyland, little girl and boy land" — but I 
have seen women with compressed lips and 
grave faces guarding their freshly cleaned 
houses against any invasion of the play 
world, and keeping themselves rigorously 
apart from any relaxation into the nonsense 



228 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

that a child naturally loves, and which I 
verily believe is of divine origin. 

I do not doubt I was dreadfully criticised 
for allowing my children to "take the house" 
when they were growing up — and I declare 
I suppose I was too lenient. I look back 
upon times when the visitor could scarcely 
have ploughed his way through the play- 
things, the harnessed-up chairs, the palan- 
quins made of chairs facing each other 
and draped in shawls and padded up with 
pillows, the dolls' beds made on turned- 
down chairs with pillows on them, the horses 
made from chairs with side-saddles on them, 
the railway trains made of chairs with the 
rocking chair in front for an engine, the 
houses made from chairs overturned to 
mark the boundaries of parlour, dining-room 
and kitchen, stretching quite across the sit- 
ting-room floor and offering a formidable 
obstacle to anyone who might possibly wish 
to cross the room. But we did not have 
many visitors — and we did have the chil- 
dren — and I declare, in looking back at 
the way I spoiled them, I really scarcely 
regret it! 



Reflections of a Grandmother 229 

I remember one time my little daughter 
and her friends were rehearsing for a play 
which they had adapted from " Little Wo- 
men." They wanted a room all to them- 
selves, so I let them have my spare bed- 
room, the largest bedroom in the house. 
They decided to have the play there and 
proceeded to erect a stage with curtains. 
While they were busy planning the stage 
settings, our neighbours trimmed up their 
fir trees. It occurred to the children that 
these huge branches from the fir trees would 
be just the thing to fix up the witch's grotto. 
So they all "fell to" and dragged the 
big fir branches upstairs — and I allowed 
them to do it. For weeks our house was 
torn up in preparation for that play and the 
spare room was a melee of fir branches, cur- 
tains, wigs, jumbled furniture and all sorts 
of stage properties. 

One Saturday morning a friend and I 
were reading German in the library, when 
the villain in the play rehearsal going on 
above got his just dues and fell dead with 
a dull thud. A smothered wail, which had 
none of the stage quality in it, reached us 



230 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

a moment later and we knew that the young 
actress had made her demise too reahstic 
and the fall had hurt, no matter how fine 
it had been from an artistic point of view. 
How we laughed — and how many years 
were added to our lives by that laugh! 

I suppose that all children have not the 
passion for playing which mine had, or which 
I, as a child, reveled in. Indeed, I have 
seen children who did not know how to 
play, but surely it is very unfortunate for 
them and they must miss much out of life. 
Our children not only delighted in playing, 
but also in making us play with them. I 
look back upon evenings of their childhood 
as to a land of strange enchantment and 
remember that all seemed real and quite 
worth while to me, just as it did to them. 
It seems to me it was quite as much fun 
for grandmother, aunty, and me to hold a 
whispered confab and decide which we would 
be, an elephant, a bear, or a kangaroo, as 
it ever was in childhood, and the suspense 
when we asked them which of these animals 
they would rather come home on was really 
quite thrilling. 



Reflections of a Grandmother 231 

Their favourite playmate was their uncle 
who weighed over two hundred pounds. If 
they could persuade him to prostrate himself 
and let them climb over him or ride on his 
back, their cup of joy was full. I used not 
to mind these romps, except that I always 
wondered if somebody would n't be killed. 
One thrilling feature of the entertainment 
was having him toss the children up over his 
head and let go of them. They always made 
him promise that he would let go of them. 
This feature received a check, however, 
when one night, he gave an unusually big 
toss and the little girl hit the ceiling with a 
sharp bump, which stunned her and scared 
her uncle out of his wits. 

Though the grown-ups have a sense of 
delight in children's romps and games which 
almost brings them to childhood again, 
there is a celestial joy of being a child which 
I think can never quite return to us, though 
love for a little child brings us very near to 
it. At my grandmother's home there was 
a little square plat of grassy back-door yard 
which was the scene of a peculiar transfig- 
uration of my childhood. On summer even- 



2)2 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

ings when the moon rose at sunset we used 
to play games here in this quaint little court, 
which was formed by the angle of the house 
on two sides, the grape arbour and milk- 
house on another, the other boundary being 
the cow lot fence. There was about this 
little place the peculiar sweetness of abso- 
lute cleanliness with the artistic touch of 
the sweet-scented honeysuckle peepingaround 
the corner of the house and a bench with 
blooming and sweet-scented things in boxes, 
portulaca, heliotrope, rose geranium, and 
lavender not far away from the dining- 
room door. I am so glad I can remember 
how I felt as my bare feet flew over the soft 
green grass — the lilt and spring of my 
little body in the elasticity of perfect free- 
dom and health. 

I wish some great artist like Corot could 
have seen us and caught for some immortal 
canvas the sweet, unconscious picture. I 
wish he could have got the old, gray house, 
the cattle browsing in the lot, the rugged 
lines of grandmother's face and figure as 
she sat in the old rocking chair on the pun- 
cheon floor of the little stoop and watched us 



Reflections of a Grandmother 2}} 

playing "black man" and "puss wants a 
corner." I am sure some wonderful figures 
would have been added to the world of art, 
for we children must, with our untrammeled 
limbs and wild, flaxen curls, have typified 
young life at its best, and the faces of our 
elders as they lent themselves to our happi- 
ness and joy would have made a study in their 
sweet relaxation from toil and worry. What 
would he have called the picture — "Peasants 
Playing" ? Maybe so, though Indiana farm- 
ers might resent the title, and grandmother, 
nodding on the stoop, was doubtless dream- 
ing of the old days in Albemarle when she 
danced with young grandees of the realm and 
knew nothing of the hard work and priva- 
tion that came to her in a pioneer country. 

When it comes to pure joy in being alive 
there is no social distinction, and when an 
artist paints happiness or woe he depicts 
something which is no respecter of persons. 

One of the great blessings of having a 
child around the house is his capability for 
bringing to us this intrinsic quality of joy 
in being. This is absolute where nearly 
every other thing is relative. 



234 Ideas of a Plain Country Woman 

Instead of setting out very early to teach 
a child the fallacies of his belief in life, we 
should try with might and main to allow him 
to teach us the fallacy of our disbelief. 
We should allow him to transmute for us 
our leaden metal into gold. If the child 
can construct a happy world out of the shabby 
old chairs in the sitting-room shall we be 
fools enough to refuse to live in it ? Shall 
we tell him to "keep still" when he shouts 
and laughs and thus shut out from our own 
ears the myriad sounds of Nature crystallised 
into human articulation ^ 

When I think of the society people who, 
night after night, have shut the children 
up in the nursery and gone away to the the- 
atre or to a stupid dinner or reception, or a 
cut and dried banquet (nothing in all the 
category of social woes is quite so bad as a 
banquet), I wonder if they have anything to 
remember which is quite so charming as the 
old fireside games we used to play at home 
or this twilight romp at grandmother's — 
classic little manifestation of human exuber- 
ance under the classic summer moon! 

I am so afraid some people, who can't 



Reflections of a Grandmother 235 

enter society and are bitter over it, might 
forget that they can have a much better 
time at home evenings in romps and 
plays with the children. I am afraid they 
keep a gloomy silence, fagging away at some 
course of "improving" reading or even 
playing cards with the neighbours instead of 
playing "William Ma-trimmity" or "Club- 
fist" or "Old Grimes is dead" or "hunt the 
thimble" with the youngsters. 

To be sure the children ought to go to bed 
early, but let them have some evening hours' 
of play when the grown folks join in whole- 
heartedly or their lives will lack some of the 
sweetest memories allotted to poor mortals. 

I will not begin telling stories about my 
grandson yet awhile, but I can scarcely wait 
for the time when he begins to see things as they 
are — heroes in hired men, a fiery charger in 
our old horse, raging cataracts in wayside 
streams, magnificent mud turtles, fine fish in 
puddles, jewels in the bridles ofhis uncle's work 
horses! And I mean to see everything just 
as he sees it, for beauty is in the eye of the 
beholder and mine shall be refitted with 
rainbow glasses for his especial benefit. 



